13 Key Benefits of GA4 | Why You Need Google Analytics 4
There’s no denying that GA4 has received mixed reviews. With that being said, we believe there are plenty of great benefits of GA4 and it is the future of digital analytics.
Here you’ll discover 11 key benefits of GA4 that you should know before you decide not to use it.
If you haven’t already made the switch, I recommend using our GA4 migration checklist or using our free GA4 migration tool to get you quickly set up.
1. Access to unsampled data
With Universal Analytics (UA), there’s a monthly limit of 10 million hits per property to the amount of data collected. And a lot of sampling occurs when processing data. But one of the benefits of GA4 is that sampling is no longer used in GA4 standard reports. There is also no limit on the amount of data you can collect.
What is the business benefit of access to unsampled data?
Having access to unsampled data is significant because it ensures that you base your decisions on more accurate and reliable data.
2. More targeted segments for marketing campaigns
Audiences in GA4 allow for more targeted segments to use in marketing campaigns. You can now create segments based on events, which is not an option in UA. It’s also useful to note that any published audience will automatically be shared with Google Ads if it’s linked.
This means that you can split and analyse your data in ways you couldn’t before!
What is the business benefit of having more targeted segments for marketing campaigns?
This ultimately allows you to build more targeted ad campaigns.
3. Different metrics & data on user engagement
Instead of giving you bounce rate, or the percentage of users that leave a page without any interaction, GA4 gives you positive data on user engagement. A session is considered engaged when it lasts for at least 10 seconds, has at least one conversion event, or involves two page views.
Just remember, engagement rate is the inverse of bounce rate. If you typically have a bounce rate of 30%, expect a 70% engagement rate.
What is the business benefit of having different metrics and data on user engagement?
The new metrics and data available in GA4 allows you to better understand how users are engaging with you website, product or service. This can help you create a better user experience.
4. Web + app tracking for a complete view of engagement across all your platforms
Web and app engagement used to always be measured separately before GA4. But GA4 now combines them into one property. This means you can now have a complete view of engagement across all your platforms within one property. All you have to do is set up the correct data streams.
What is the business benefit of web + app tracking?
This helps paint a fuller picture of how users are engaging with your business across devices. Ultimately giving you more accurate data that enables you to build a better user experience and customer journey.
5. Life cycle feature in GA4
Another benefit of Google Analytics 4 is getting a bird’s eye view of your users’ journey. There is a feature called Life Cycle in GA4, under which you can find Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention report. And these reports help paint a clearer picture of your customer journey.
Find what areas need more focus, then refine. Marginal gains are the way forward here.
What is the business benefit of the life cycle feature in GA4?
By understanding how users navigate through your sales funnel you can begin to optimise your customer journey for conversions, retention and everything else before or in between.
A move towards cookieless data has started in the last few years. With regulations like GDPR and CCPA in place, It’s just going to get more and more difficult to track users using cookies. GA4 can be a good friend of yours in such a world. Using AI and machine learning, GA4 implements more intelligent tracking that is not reliant on cookies.
It does this by assigning a random clientID on every page unload instead of a cookie. This means we can still collect data whilst keeping the user anonymous.
Although you’re unlikely to land yourself in any hot water just yet, the move to ‘cookieless data’ is happening. It’s important to remain GDPR compliant as fines for infringing GDPR can be 4% of global revenue or up to €20 million. Amazon have managed to rack up an impressive €746 million fine for doing exactly that.
7. More funnels in GA4
The addition of extra funnels is a great benefit of Google Analytics 4. Previously, UA users only had access to the standard 5-step funnel unless they paid $150K for GA360. Now GA4 users can make the most of the following funnels to name a few:
- Open Funnels
- Trended Funnels
- Time-Based Tracking in Funnels
- What happens next
- Advanced Path Analysis
- Audiences & Funnels
What is the business benefit of having more funnels in GA4?
The addition of more funnels means that there are now more ways to analyse and dig deep into your data. Analysing your purchase funnel in more detail will allow you to better identify problems and fix them to ultimately improve conversion rates.
8. Predict user behaviour with predictive metrics
What if I told you that you can predict which users are likely to purchase within the next month and how much revenue will come from it? Well, now you can. One of the great benefits of GA4 is the new feature called predictive metrics. There are three that Google lists:
- Purchase probability: The probability that a user who was active in the last 28 days will log a specific conversion event within the next 7 days.
- Churn probability: The probability that a user who was active on your app or site within the last 7 days will not be active within the next 7 days.
- Revenue prediction: The revenue expected from all purchase conversions within the next 28 days from a user who was active in the last 28 days.
What is the business benefit of predictive metrics?
There are a lot of benefits to predictive metrics. For example, with the ability to predict which customers are going to churn, you can then deliver an ad campaign designed specifically for user retention.
Advanced predictive metrics allow you to prepare for the future better than you were ever able to before.
9. Native debug view allows you to see values more easily
Google Analytics 4 has a debug feature. This allows you to debug your implementation within the GA4 interface. In the configure section, you can see the debug view. You can see every event logged along with the parameter and user properties.
What is the business benefit of native debug view?
This will help analysts more effectively troubleshoot problems ultimately saving time and money.
10. More dimensions and metrics
In Google Analytics 4 you now have access to more dimensions and metrics:
- 25 named user-scoped custom dimensions.
- 50 custom dimensions.
- 50 custom metrics.
What is the business benefit of having more dimensions and metrics?
Having more dimensions and metrics simply means that you can get a more detailed view of your data which helps you make better analyses and decisions.
11. Automatically collected events and simplified goal (conversion) setup
Previously, setting up goal tracking, which is now called conversion tracking, sometimes required some knowledge of code, especially in more complex setups where third-party sites are involved in transaction processes etc.
Now, pretty much out-of-the-box, there is a plethora of automatically collected events that cover what most people need. The process for setting up tracking for GA4 conversions is also now much simpler.
What is the business benefit of automatically collected events?
For most users, GA4 will cover a lot of their needs from the get-go. Furthermore, analysts will not need to spend as much time setting up more complex tracking saving time and money.
12. Linking with other Google products
Google Analytics 4 integrates with more Google tools such as Google Merchant Center and BigQuery for free! Having more integrations with different tools in the Google suite allows you to better synch up and analyse your marketing performance.
Google BigQuery is an extremely powerful tool that enables enterprises to process and analyse massive amounts of data in seconds across datasets. So you can link GA4 with data with other sources of data.
What is the business benefit of linking with other Google products?
For people that want to use BigQuery, this used to cost $150,000 as you had to purchase GA360 to use it. It’s now free! Linking other platforms like Google Merchant Center will give you greater insight across your channels such as being able to analyse conversions from Google Product Listings.
13. GA4 is improving and adding features constantly
Probably the most promising ‘benefit’ is that Google will constantly be adding new GA4 features. However, if you still have your UA property, keep it. You don’t have all that historical data in GA4, so your reports are limited.
There are also a few missing features in GA4 that were previously present in UA. So you don’t want to completely migrate over yet. Run them simultaneously whilst you get used to GA4. Just make sure that you don’t have them both linked to Google Ads because you risk double counting.
The best way to keep on track of new GA4 features is by signing up to our newsletter and following our LinkedIn page where we post updates daily.
Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below!
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