Be sure to mark your calendars for the new Google Analytics 4 that will start processing on July 1st, 2023. Google announced on March 16th that they will begin sunsetting Universal Analytics moving into next year. What this means is that Google Analytics 4 will become the new cross-platform analytic solution instead of Universal Analytics. However, it’s important to note that with the introduction of Universal Analytics 360 in the beginning of October 2021, those properties will receive an additional three months of new hit processing that will then end on October 1st, 2023. Learn more details about the switch and how it can benefit your business!
Why Is the Switch Being Made?
Universal Analytics was made for individuals to measure online independent sessions, observable data from cookies, and measurements from desktops. As time moves on, some of these factors have become outmoded and trivial. Google Analytics 4 moves more into delivering more user focused measurements and cross-platform insights and statistics. Along with cross-platform functionality, privacy for users becomes more comprehensive and coarse for individuals to control for data collection and usage. Google Analytics 4 will also no longer store IP addresses. With some factors becoming more obsolete, these solutions and controls help benefit users with more privacy and functionality.
What Are the Benefits of Google Analytics 4?
Google Analytics 4 is designed to help users keep track of a number of key business objectives. Whether they be generating leads, driving sales or app installs, or the connection of online and offline customer engagement. Here is a list of benefits that should come from Google Analytics 4:
Understanding Customers Across Touchpoints
With this benefit you’re able to get a complete picture of customers through an event-based measurement model that isn’t fragmented by platforms or organized into independent sessions. Google Analytics 4 ultimately helps you understand your customers and understand how they move through purchasing something from a business.
Improving Data-Driven Attribution
Utilizing data-driven attribution helps you understand the full impact of your marketing efforts from a customer perspective. Google Analytics 4 will help you see how marketing activities influence conversions and help to further improve campaigns.
Keeping Business Needs in Mind
With new country-level privacy controls, users are able to manage and minimize the collection of user-level data (such as cookies and metadata) while preserving key measurements.
Gaining More Valuable and Actionable Data
Google Analytics 4 has machine learning to help generate more predictive insights about user behavior and conversions. This machine learning also helps create new audiences of users interested in purchasing and automatically surfaces critical insights. Having these insightful tools helps users have more valuable data to go off of and work to their benefit.
Along with having valuable data, Google Analytics 4 will also provide more actionable data. This actionable data involves expanded integrations with other Google products such as Google Ads. This combines web and app data makes it easy to use Analytics insights to help further campaigns to their fullest potential.
Addresses Enterprise Needs
New sub and roll-up properties in Analytics 360 allow you to customize the structure of your Google Analytics 4 properties to help meet data governance needs. This helps ensure that different teams and partners can access the data they need in accordance with your policies.
Looking to the Future
When it comes to Google Universal Analytics, they will stop processing hits on July 1st, 2023. For 360 Universal Analytics, they will stop processing new hits on October 1st, 2023 (three months after). After these two dates, users will be able to access previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months.
The best way to prepare is by making the move over to Google Analytics 4 now. This will ultimately help build necessary historical data before Universal Analytics stops processing new hits.
