Challenges with Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics is moving towards a completely new analytics suite. It is no longer possible to create a new, familiar Universal Analytics account. We are now being forced to implement Google Analytics 4 straight away. How is it different, and why is it better?

Google Analytics 4 Guidelines

Google Analytics 4 is all about tags and machine learning. A tag is a label for an action. Examples include ‘contact form submitted’, ‘click on email address’ and ‘recording of e-commerce data’. Fortunately, Google Analytics 4 doesn’t leave online marketers completely in the lurch and also offers automatic tagging. Naturally, you’ll want to be ‘in control’ yourself, but to come up with your own tags, you need to get to grips with the rules.

Google Tag Manager is a must

Google Analytics 4 works hand in hand with Google Tag Manager, or GTM for short. You can either choose to place tags in the source code (though you’ll always need a developer to do this) or install GTM once and then manage everything from within that application.

A pipe dream

Suddenly, Google Analytics 4 was here, so it took a bit of getting used to to properly understand exactly how it works, so that you can get the most out of it. The only downside is that the documentation is still very much a work in progress and there are few articles about it online. What’s more, it still feels like it’s ‘under development’ and looks a bit unfinished. The potential is huge, because the addition of machine learning means that Google Analytics 4 can provide valuable suggestions based on the data (and the data from many others).

We are currently implementing Google Analytics 4 alongside our existing Google Analytics Universal accounts. GTM makes this straightforward! This means our reports remain intact and we can gain experience with Google Analytics 4 without any disruption.