Since 2005, Google Analytics has been empowering businesses to improve the performance of internet marketing efforts by providing them with the power of data.
Data can unlock the secrets to internet success. With this vision, Google launched the advanced version of Google Analytics- ‘Google Analytics 4’
Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is the new power for digital marketers who want to upgrade their internet marketing efforts with more accurate real-time data.
Data is the new gold mine. Millions of businesses use Google Analytics to understand their customer behavior and get business insights that can help them create a better online marketing strategy.
But in the past few years, user privacy and how their data are being used is becoming a hot concern. Data collection is the biggest challenge for every business organization due to growing concern of consumer privacy and lack of data collection intelligence.
And Google Analytics 4 is the next big step that makes analytics more advanced and keeps pace with modern consumer behavior and industry standards.
Vidhya Srinivasan, Vice President of Google’s Measurement, Buying, Analytics and Google Ads, said “To help you get better ROI from your marketing for the long term, we’re creating a new, more intelligent Google Analytics that builds on the foundation of the App + Web property we introduced in beta last year.
It has machine learning at its core to automatically surface helpful insights and gives you a complete understanding of your customers across devices and platforms. It’s privacy-centric by design, so you can rely on Analytics even as industry changes like restrictions on cookies and identifiers create gaps in your data.”
Google claims that Google Analytics 4 has features that give you smart insights to improve your marketing decision and get high ROI.
In this blog, eSearch Logix will discuss what are the hot features in Google Analytics 4 that help in internet marketing and drive better results. By the end of this blog, you will learn many important things about GA4 and how it will benefit your business.
What is Google Analytics 4?
Google Analytics 4 is the latest version of Google’s Universal Analytics Property. It is built on the foundation of Google’s App + Web Property. GA4 uses artificial intelligence and machine learning based algorithms that provide in-depth insights to better understand web traffic and user behaviors.
The main difference between the older Google Analytics and the new version is GA4 uses AI to fill the gaps in data where the older version lacked because of the cookie consent issue.
What Makes Google Analytics 4 Unique?
Google Analytics is the backbone of internet marketing because it gives essential information about website traffic analysis and user online behavior. In the previous version of Google analytics known as Universal Analytics, data collection wasn’t up to mark due to cookie consent issues. It used to give new tracking codes for your websites.
GA4 is completely different from Universal Analytics. GA4 and UA are based on different architectural models. GA works on the Event-Driven model, whereas Universal Analytics is based on the Session-based data model.
Unlike Universal Analytics, Google Analytics offers cross-device reporting, predictive audience, and metrics that help you understand users who are most interested in buying your products or services and have better chances of lead conversion.
One of the top unique features of GA4 is that it is built with keeping privacy regulation in mind that allows IT data security team to ensure data collection meets marketing requirements and privacy regulations:
- IP Anonymization
- Consent Mode (beta)
- Data Retention Period
- Avoid Collecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
- User Data Deletion
In fact, Google Analytics 4 is the next-generation data analytics tool for digital marketers who want to get accurate information about user behavior, user privacy preferences, and consume less time in collecting and aggregating data. This is because of three main technologies that Google used in this version:
- Firebase Analytics
- Google Signals
- Google Site Tag
Hot Features of Google Analytics 4 That Help in the Internet Marketing
1. Customer Life Cycle based User Interface
Providing content at the right time matters a lot to capture the audience’s attention in a content marketing plan. You need to understand where users fall in the customer life cycle and what their decision-making factors are at a particular stage.
Here, Google Analytics 4’s reports provide information based on customer life cycle: acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention. And using these metrics, digital marketers can easily do ad hoc marketing analysis and collect data for better performance and brand storytelling.
2. Analytics Intelligence to Discover Market Trends
GA4 has solid analytic intelligence capabilities that use machine learning and statistical techniques to recognize anomalies, trends, and new types of users. By using its Custom Insights feature, you can set targets to set the logic and discover new market trends. GA4’s Analytics Intelligence has two types of insights:
- Automated insights: It finds out any unusual patterns or emerging trends in your data and informs you automatically on the dashboard
- Custom Insights: It allows you to set conditions that identify important changes in your data.
This feature is highly beneficial for eCommerce websites which heavily rely on real-time accurate data. It enables marketers to stay ahead and eCommerce marketing efforts while reducing the time consumed on manual gathering and analyzing of data- GA4 will do it for you.
3. Smart Online Advertisement
The new version Google Analytics 4 provides the latest integrations across Google’s marketing products. You can integrate Google Ads to reach your target audience with more relevant and useful content that engages them easily.
As GA4 measures app and web interactions together that contains conversions from YouTube-engaged views in its reports. Besides seeing conversions from YouTube videos, you can also see data from other platforms like Google, non-Google channels, social media channels, email marketing, and other sources.
When you have all these features together in one hand, you can easily know what affects your internet marketing campaign and eventually unlock the keys to online success.
4. Better Understanding of How Users Interact with Your Business
The previous versions of Google Analytics would give user information based on either device type or platform. But GA4 offers customer-centric measurement by using various identity spaces like user IDs, unique Google signals that give you a better understanding of how users interact with your website or business.
Today, when consumers’ needs are changing day by day, businesses need to make real-time decisions to win as well as to retain new customers. Google Analytics 4 serves this purpose by giving simplified and well-organized reports so you can intelligently find marketing insights based on each part of customer journey.
For instance, you can view what channels are driving new customers in the user acquisition report then use these engagement and retention reports to better understand the actions that users take.
5. Smart Insights for Improved Internet Marketing Decision and High ROI
Google Analytics’ advanced machine learning models automatically send alerts about important changes in your data such as -rise in the demand for a particular product.
It calculates churn probability that helps you make right decision which customers deserves investment in the future customer retention policy. Its smart insights enable you reach higher value customers and provide improved understanding of why some customers deserve more marketing investment than others.
6. New Engagement Metrics
The previous version of Google Analytics-Universal Analytics would tell bounce rate, or the percentage of users who leave a page without any interaction. GA4 provides new engagement metrics better than previous ones.
Its new engagement metrics focus on positive data on user engagement. ‘Enhanced Measurement Events’ feature that incorporate scroll, site search, video engagement, and file downloads, allow you to know exactly how users are interacting with your website and content.
These features help you know whether your blog post or product landing page has sufficient user engagement its terms of metrics like time spent on a page.
If you consider the suggestions of Top Digital Marketing Agency India, they believe that GA4’s new engagement metrics quickly provide smart insights about your PPC campaigns and what channels are driving results in more favorable conversions.
Here are Google Analytics 4’s new engagement metrics:
- Engaged Sessions
- Engaged Sessions per User
- Active Users
- Engagement Rate
- Average Engagement Time
- Improved data import
- User engagement
7. Predictive Metrics for Future Actions
The whole purpose of collecting data is to improve your business decision. And without having the capability to predict customer behavior you cannot make your decision future-proof. Just think if you can know which users are likely to purchase within the next month and how much revenue may come from their buying?
Right, you won the game.
Predictive marketing analytics empowers marketers with a competitive advantage; it gives essential data for planning, strategizing, creating, and implementing an effective internet marketing campaign for your business.
To serve this purpose, Google Analytics 4 provides AI-based predictive metrics that give deeper insights into customer behavior and their potential buying habits. With these predictive metrics, you can predict the future action that a customer may take and invest wisely in retaining customers.
GA4 has three predictive metrics that help you in planning a well-analyzed marketing campaign:
- Purchase probability
- Churn probability
- Revenue prediction
8. New Privacy Controls
Ensuring user privacy while collecting data is the biggest challenge for modern marketers. There are different country state’s data and privacy regulation policies like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act, Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, Colorado Privacy Act, which sets limitations on marketers in data collection.
Google Analytics 4 provides a wide range of features for privacy controls that marketers can use to ensure they are compliant with the latest regulations:
- Disable Analytics data collection (web+app)
- Disable advertising personalization (web+app)
- IP Anonymization
- Set the retention period
- User-level Data Access and Portability
- Delete end-user data stored on Analytics servers
- Use the Google Analytics for Firebase iOS SDK to register attribution with SKAdNetwork
- Allow for Disable ads personalization for any property
With all these privacy controls, you can collect user data while ensuring data regulations of different countries without any extra effort.
Conclusion
Google Analytics 4 is the next-generation data analytics tool that empowers modern digital marketers. It has AI and ML-based features that allow you to reach your target audience efficiently.
Every business has limited budget for internet marketing. They need to ensure each marketing campaign drives better ROI; otherwise, it will be difficult for them to constantly stay in the top of today’s competitive market. And Google Analytics provides modern features that help you drive maximum results and business revenue by the power of advanced data analytics.
But as GA4 is an advanced tool, you need professional guidance who can assist you make the best out of it. Here, eSearch Logix provides Google Analytics Services for all types of businesses.
Our expert digital marketers, data scientists, and AI specialists are already enabling business organizations to create excellent internet marketing campaigns for their products & services. eSearch Logix is an expert of Google Analytics 4 who can guide you on how to intelligently use it to get the maximum revenue.
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