Google Analytics Updates: UA to GA4
So Google Analytics UA is phased out as of June 30, 2023 and the new GA4 is up and running as of July 1, 2023. While they have gone in to add a new GA4 option to all existing clients, it’s still required that you login, setup up and connect to your site manually.
Why did Google move to GA4 Google Analytics?
The creation of GA4 is Google’s shift to a “privacy-first” approach to cross-channel data tracking. The goal is to focus on the user and their journey. With GA4, marketers will be able to track users across your website, software, and app. GA4 represents the direction of Google Analytics and offers a more robust and advanced set of features. By transitioning to GA4, you can take advantage of the latest tracking capabilities, gain deeper insights into user behavior, and stay ahead in the evolving landscape of analytics and marketing.
Your Data is all There with some Changes …
While all your data from UA is still there, the GA4 will now be collecting all traffic data with some changes including additions and dropped stats.
- Total Users in GA4 will now be considered the total number of unique users who logged an event.
- New Users are those who interacted with your site for the first time.
- And an Active User is any user who visited your website. Basically, since Total Users was used in UA, and Active Users in used GA4, they are primarily the same, when compared.
- Pageviews in GA4 is now termed as “Views”. This is the total number of webpages the user saw, even if they have repeated views of the same page. (Unique pageview of UA has been discontinued.)
- Regarding Pageviews, Google notes, “Page changes based on browser history events: GA4’s enhanced measurement by default measures page changes based on browser history events ; UA does not. This will cause higher pageviews in GA4 than UA and can lead to discrepancies.”
- An improvement of GA4 is the views of web, app and mobile data will all be combined into one. So all the data is combined into one and easier to read. This unified data collection as an “event” in GA4 (regardless of if it’s from website or mobile app) will make it much easier to understand the overall SEO picture of your online presence. You can also filter out both separately, if need be.
- Sessions are no longer counted once a new day is reached (at midnight), as it was in UA, but now the session will end after a 30-minute period of inactivity. If user returns to site after session timeout, a new session will start.
- You can set up multiple conversion events, for example a form submission, a thank-you page or specific landing page, etc. So conversions are based on a determined event on your site. Purchase events can be set up for websites with ecommerce functionality.
- Bounce rates have been discontinued in GA4 and can now be siphoned out between engaged sessions versus sessions. An engaged session is any session that has lasted at least 10 second, had 1 conversion event or at least 2 page views.
- In UA there were three parts to your account: (1) Account; (2) Property, (3) View. Now it’s just Account & Property, and no longer uses views but can still be achieved with data streams.
- New Privacy updates include first-party cookies with exclusion of IP addresses of visitors. “Google has gone to great lengths to make GA4 as privacy-centric as possible. To that end, it’s possible to collect data on GA4 without using third-party cookies or collecting IP addresses.” – Neil Patel
- Spam referrals thankfully are also being discontinued. GA4 is preventing spam by forcing all Measurement Protocol hits to have a secret key, which filters out spam referrals before they are recorded by the platform.
Making the Transition Easier and Stats More Accessible with Site Kit
With each update to GA4, I would recommend and have installed on my clients’ website is Google’s Site Kit WordPress Plugin. Site Kit helps you build, maintain and grow your online presence, with easy-to-understand metrics and actionable insights right on your WordPress dashboard.
Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free.
Google Site Kit Benefits include:
- Easy-to-understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard
- Official insights from multiple Google tools
- Quick setup for multiple Google tools without having to edit the source code of your site
- With aggregated insights from Google products, no need to collect data from multiple sources for reporting purposes. Site Kit shows key metrics and insights from different Google products: Analytics, Search Console, Ad Sense, and more.
- Easy-to-manage, granular permissions across WordPress and different Google products
- Site performance stats and recommendations come straight from Google
- You can have multiple users to manage access to Site Kit data.
- It’s fairly easily to install and connect to your products, as long as your Google products are under one Google account.
- Gives you another reason to login to your WordPress dashboard, so site owner can see stats and review right there.
- Site Kit has now updated the view to the GA4 Metrics view, so it matches what you see on your Analytics pages.
Site Kit is a great way easily track and analyze what’s happening on your website., even if you’re an Analytics novice.
Need help?
If you need help installing, converting to or understanding GA4, or the Google Site Kit plugin, please call us so we can schedule a time to meet over
the phone, in person or on Zoom.
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