GA4 – What You Need to Know as Google Revamps its Analytics Suite

GA4 has actually been available to use for a couple of years now – chances are, if you use Google Analytics, you’ve already seen prompts to make the switch over. But we’re all to differing extents creatures of habit. Many Google Analytics users simply won’t see the need to change over until they absolutely have to. Yet with that day drawing nearer and nearer, it’s time to at least take a look at GA4, understand what it can do and start to plan your transition. The two changes that have attracted most of the attention so far are the fact that GA4 supports cookieless web tracking and that it lets you combine web and mobile app data in a single view. But long term, the change that is likely to have the biggest impact on users is that it makes a fundamental switch away from collecting and monitoring session-based data to foregrounding event and user data instead. Let’s unpick each of those in turn.

COOKIELESS TRACKING

One of the big reasons Google gave for developing GA4 was to align analytics with its ambitions for a more privacy-friendly web. And cookies are very firmly in the tech giant’s crosshairs. For most of the history of the internet, collecting web data has depended on cookies – small files implanted on a user’s device when they click on a web page that contain unique identifiers. The simplest cookies provide basic data like page hits, session times, number of unique visits, frequency of visits etc. But over time, cookies have evolved to be able to collect and share data about the user, such as location and IP address. From a privacy perspective, what concerns consumer rights advocates most is that such information is not just shared with the website a user clicks on. Often other parties, such as digital advertising companies, circulate their own cookies via websites so they can track campaign performance and target the ads users see. It’s this rather murky free-for-all in user data that Google has taken aim at. From next year, its Chrome browser will no longer support third-party cookies. Introducing cookieless tracking on GA4 is part of the same mission, whilst also recognising that website owners and digital marketers still need a way of monitoring usage and performance data beyond. It’s important to say that GA4 doesn’t end cookie-based tracking completely – in fact, it still relies pretty heavily on first-party cookies, or cookies used directly by websites (and which, under laws like the GDPR, users have to consent to before they enter a site). But it loosens reliance on data obtained from cookies, using Machine Learning and advanced data modelling techniques to ‘fill in gaps’ so less data has to be collected, making tracking less invasive overall.

INTEGRATED WEB AND APP DATA

In Universal Analytics, you have to collect data from websites and mobile apps as separate entities. There’s no simple way to integrate and compare web and app data. Given that people nowadays do the majority of their web browsing on mobile and switch fluidly between websites on a browser and mobile apps, this doesn’t reflect the realities of modern web usage. Google has put this right with GA4, which lets you collect and analyse web and app data as a single property.