Is it worth upgrading to GA4? Is ga4 google analytics worth the ballyhoo it is getting? It’s all over the map — a lot of marketers are struggling to get answers to a few of these questions even when they know everything about the GA4 update.
In a recent development, Google Analytics updated to Google Analytics 4 or GA4. It replaced the long-lived Universal Analytics (UA). You might wonder why it is called Google Analytics 4 — we’ll explain that later on in the blog.
What is your first impression whenever a new version of a product is launched? Before you know it, your mind starts contemplating, “Is it worth updating to the new version, or should you stick to the older version?” While sometimes you’ll be convinced to update to the new version only immediately, in the other case, you would consider sticking to the older version. The same is true with Google Analytics 4 or GA4 updates.
Why is it called Google Analytics 4 upgrade?
To help you get the answer to why it is called Google Analytics 4 update, let’s walk through the history of Google analytics. The answer lies in the evolution of Google Analytics. So, at the initial stage it was called Urchin (the name was taken from the name of the company that Google bought in 2005). The next version was Classic Analytics, which later became Universal Analytics. Before Google Analytics 4 upgrade was introduced in October 2020, you were using Universal Analytics.
What is Google Analytics 4 upgrade?
In the 15-year long history of Analytics, Google Analytics 4 upgrade is the biggest thing! Google has worked for years for this new development to happen and there is much more to come in the years to come. Many Digital marketing experts & Google itself in its press release says, “Google Analytics 4 upgrade is the future of analytics”. And, the sooner you upgrade to Upgrade to GA4, the better it would be for your business and your SEO strategy.
However, it might require a little more time & effort to implement the Google Analytics 4 upgrade, but the results are going to stay! This is our second blog on Google Analytics 4 upgrade. In our first post, we talked about what GA4 is and how to upgrade it.
So, we thought of discussing why you should upgrade to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and what are its benefits. In the preceding section, we would be discussing how the GA4 upgrade will help you realign your analytics with business objectives and how it will give you a more potent way of analyzing, tracking & measuring your developments.
Let’s see how:
Reasons why you should upgrade to Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
- Google Analytics 4 upgrade is the future of Analytics.
With the GA4 upgrade, Google is now going to focus its present & future developments solely on Google Analytics 4. So, the idea is to start as early as possible so that we get acquainted with what it is like and what are its benefits. While Universal Analytics (UA) will obviously not be deprecated, it will become less relevant. The best solution is to run GA4 along with Universal Analytics. GA4 is already functioning from October 16, 2020, and more new standard features will be added in the years to come.
- GA4 upgrade will enhance your measurement & tracking.
Enhanced measurement — this is one of the most exciting features of GA4. It will help with automatically tracking outbound clicks, site search, scroll events, and file downloads using the base GA4 tag. You don’t need any additional tagging or code — it can be simply done by turning to the enhanced measurement of the GA4 interface.
In addition to that, with the latest GA4 update the engagement track has moved to the next level. There are more sophisticated engagement measures of Engagement Time and Engaged Sessions are in place — that will replace the infamous bounce rate. Now a visitor will be automatically marked as “engaged” upon spending more than 10 seconds on the site. However, it might take a little longer for the Universal Analytics users to get acquainted with GA4, it will get you a more useful standard measure of engagement.
- You can identify visitors across devices.
The GA4 upgrade will allow you to identify visitors across multiple devices with the help of Google’s user identity data. For years, it has been a struggle for digital marketers and experts to identify the same visitors across multiple devices unless they are logged into your app or website. With the GA4 upgrade, even when the users do not have a user ID they can be identified across different devices with the help of Google signals. By default, GA4 will identify users most accurately — first, it will look for the user ID then it will check data from the Google signals and then use the default client ID.
- The GA4 upgrade is easy.
In our previous blog, we have specified steps for Google Analytics upgrade — it’s easy if you are using Universal Analytics. If you are still not familiar with — how to upgrade to Google analytics 4 click the link. You’ll find the easy steps for the GA4 upgrade here.
- There’s more coming up.
Google is still working on its new update and it will now focus completely on Google Analytics 4. So, you’ll definitely have more in the near future where you can transfer features from your UA property to your GA4 property. In the present scenario, there aren’t any filtering capabilities as in UA property — but it could come up very soon.
Takeaways.
As one would expect, inevitably Google Analytics 4 will get you more in-depth & powerful data for your analysis to be done correctly than UA. It will get you more relevant data on why users are coming to your site. However, you won’t get everything right off the bat, but upgrading to Google Analytics 4 early will make it easy for you. It is evident site owner & digital marketing experts must upgrade to GA4 as early as possible.