Recently, Google announced the retirement of Universal Analytics in July 2023. After retirement, UA will no longer produce new website traffic data. Users will have access to their existing data for at least six months. During this grace period, users are encouraged to export all their historical data to avoid losing it forever. Google, however, has provided an alternative to marketing teams so that they don’t have to find substitutes for website analytics by introducing Google Analytics 4, which will replace Universal Analytics hence ensuring customer retention.
Google Analytics 4
Introduced in October 2020, Google Analytics 4 is a different property tailored to help existing businesses succeed with predictive insights, in-depth integration with Ads, and solving the developing measurement standards. And now, this powerful property is the replacement for Universal Analytics.
Why Google Analytics 4 is replacing Universal Analytics?
Foremost, the change is a move to minimize cookies when using data. From what we know, Universal Analytics is mainly built for cookies, while GA4 doesn’t depend on cookies exclusively; instead, GA4 utilizes the event-based model, which usually operates on all platforms available. Google Analytics 4 has been designed so that the main focus is ensuring that privacy is maximally maintained. It does this by providing anonymous IP addresses by default. Furthermore, it ensures privacy is upheld by supporting consent mode and the capacity to upscale conversations and cookie-based sessions using the cookies sampling pixels. Lastly, GA4 provides an ability to set the regional controls and gives you better and advanced user-deletion data control, hence providing maximum security.
Benefits of Google Analytics 4 over Universal Analytics
Google Analytics 4 has more eye-opening insights. This property will automatically inform you of any critical trends in your daily data, like products that show an increase in demand due to the customer’s new needs. Additionally, this property enables you to predict and anticipate the future steps of your customers. For example, it clearly calculates the churn probability so that as the business owner, you can invest in the retention of the customers, especially when the marketing budgets are dealing with a lot of pressure.
Furthermore, Google Analytics 4 provides a more profound analysis engagement by giving you the customer-centric measurement rather than measurement fragmented by the platform of the device. Google Analytics 4 utilizes the numerous identity spaces such as unique Google signals, and marketer users provide User IDs. This allows the users to enjoy a complete view and understand how your customers usually interact with their individual businesses. For example, a customer can discover your business through an ad on your website, visit your website and make a purchase.
With this new change, businesses will also benefit since they will be able to understand their customers better across the entire cycle, from purchase to conversion and retention. This is very essential when there is a need to make real-time decisions for you to win, significantly when the needs of customers are constantly changing.
Additionally, Google Analytics 4 integrates freely with Google BigQuery. Available on the Google Marketing Platform, BigQuery’s cloud data warehouse allows professional marketers to run fast queries for large datasets, export data from GA 360 to BigQuery and use SQL commands to query data, and use BigQuery ACLS to manage permissions and datasets. This is truly a game-changer!
Lastly, GA4 also supports better sessionization, ensuring that it’s more accurate in cross-platform tracking and event-based data organization. This means that you can comfortably bring together the web and the app’s performance into one account and then paint a full picture of your customer’s journey without hardships. This ensures that you are in apposition to optimize some parts of the journey that you previously were unable to fully connect between the dots hence making it a very huge benefit.
The Wrap-Up!
The transition from Universal to Google Analytics 4 will widely bring about significant benefits such as its feature of providing insights, lack of dependency on cookies as in the case of Universal Analytical, which is built-in cookies, being in apposition to integrate freely with BioQuery and its feature that ensures that the cycle from purchase to retention is well understood makes the transition a change that you have been waiting for.
Bottom line, if your website still uses the Universal Analytics tool, the property will stop tracking your site on July 1, 2023. At MFJ Creative Studios, all websites that we have developed for our clients already have the GA4 Property integrated into their existing websites. So there’s no need to worry, you are all covered!
Here’s more information and details regarding the Google UA Sunset.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en
If your website still operates under the Google UA Property and needs help transitioning, we can help with the migration!
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