Google Sets Deadline for GA4 Transition
(5 min. read or watch the video content for this blog here)
Unless you've lived under a rock (and if you do, I have questions), you can't miss the news that Google will be sunsetting their Google Analytics Universal dashboard in July 2023. This will give website owners and marketers 14 months to transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). At that point, GA3 will stop processing new data. Any website traffic after July 1, 2023, will not appear in GA3 Google Analytics views. Yet, Google did announce that it will continue to store historical data in GA3 for at least six months. We've put together a few solutions to minimize the impact on your marketing reporting during this time of transition, but first, let's chat about our feelings.
We aren’t TOO excited about this for frankly a lot of reasons:
- GA4 has a more sparse and minimal (and yet somehow more complicated) user interface.
- GA4 has deprecated some of the data we were able to see in Google Analytics Universal
- The removal of historical data
- GA4 does not allow additional ‘views’ whereas GA3 allowed a ‘filtered’, ‘test’, and ‘master’ view
- Reduced e-commerce tracking
- Reduced (aka almost non-existent) options in attribution reports
Why should I migrate over NOW rather than July of 2023?
- Being able to compare data collection accuracy between the 2 versions
- Learning the different measurement models - labeled sessions and pageviews (GA3) vs events and parameters (GA4)
- Creating a year’s worth of historical data within GA4
SO what’s the good news?
We have an experienced team who can make the switch for you! This will unfold in 2 phases.
Phase 1:
- Create a new GA4 property (if one doesn’t already exist)
- GA4 settings configured
- Filters configured
- Integrate with Google Search Console
- GTM tag created and pushed live
If you’d like to stop there, that’s fine! That will ensure you’re getting the basic functionalities of GA4. If you want to take it a step further, we’d take you to Phase 2 where our team will set up a call with you to go over additional GTM tags and triggers that capture additional events (not tracked by default) and send over a proposal for time needed to accomplish the task.
Sneak Peek! 2nd piece of good news
For the past 7 months, our team has been working tirelessly to innovate our reporting system for several reasons. The result is an advanced reporting and analytics insight engine that offers significant improvements over existing reporting platforms.
So what will this system do that others won’t or haven’t been able to do in the past?
1. True omnichannel view of all your marketing initiatives, both digital and traditional (yes that says traditional!)
- How many times have you asked yourselves or us if your stimulus media is “working”? Well, we’ve taken you a step in the direction of that knowledge by pulling your spot logs in and showing activity within 30 minutes of airing
2. Performance benchmarking and predictive analytics to help you model changes to your marketing strategy
3. Completely integrated reports and dashboards to give you accurate insights about your total media mix and marketing strategy
4. Customizable alerts to let you know when something changes
5. Easy to use dashboards with guided insights for commonly asked questions.
7. Native support for nearly two dozen of the most used digital marketing platforms, and extensibility to more than 400 data connectors through Google Data Studio.
8. A lightning fast data lake house architecture that provides low-cost, efficient, highly scalable enterprise data storage and retrieval.
Additionally, our new platform combines a more advanced web measurement engine that picks up where GA4 leads off and offers built-in heat maps, session recording, funnel analysis, form analysis and detailed goal tracking.
Stay tuned for the launch of this innovative new product. We can't wait to share with you!
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