Google Analytics gets updated with Major Features and Integration for App+Web.
- Google Analytics 4 introduces smart features
- Integration of App and Web data for easy access to information
- Google Analytics 4 will be the default option when you set up a new property.
Millions of businesses, large and small, rely on Google Analytics to understand customer preferences and create better experiences for them. With more commerce moving online and businesses under increased pressure to make every marketing dollar count, insights from digital analytics tools are even more critical.
New AI-powered insights and predictions
While machine learning-powered insights in Analytics have been available for some time, the new insights and predictions making their way to Google Analytics 4 can automatically alert marketers to data trends such as surging demand for a product they sell.
This technology is also used to predict outcomes, such as churn rates and the potential revenue a business could earn from a particular segment of customers. Those insights can help marketers anticipate actions their customers might take in the future and focus on higher-value audiences.
Deeper audiences integration with Google Ads
Marketers can build and maintain audiences from their visitors across the web and their app. If a user qualified for an audience list due to an action taken on the web and was taken off a list because they completed a purchase within the app, for example, the list would then be automatically updated to remove the user so that they’re not retargeted with ads.
YouTube engaged views tracked alongside cross-network, Google search and Google Display Network ads. Image: Google.
Additionally, Google Analytics 4 will report on actions from YouTube engaged views that occur in-app as well as on the web.
Customer lifecycle-framed reporting
One of the most striking differences between Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics is how reports are organized.
The reports are designed to help marketers drill down into particular aspects of the customer journey.
The new Analytics experience also aims to give marketers a more complete view of how customers are engaging with their businesses across devices as well as channels. Marketers can provide Their own user ID or enable Google signals to deduplicate users across devices for reporting and ad targeting.
Codeless Event tracking
Expanded codeless features make it easier for marketers to track and measure on-site and in-app actions that matter — in real-time — such as a page scroll or video play, without having to add code or set up event tracking in Google Tag Manager. Within Universal Analytics, event tracking requires additional processing which includes latency, and the data is typically not available until the following day.
More granular user data controls
Analytics 4 also includes options to help advertisers comply with data regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Consent mode is designed for sites that have to obtain end-user consent to collect analytics data. This new mode provides separate consent opt-ins for analytics and ads. “Without this level of granularity in the previous version [of Google Analytics], what we were seeing customers do is simply exclude analytics wholesale, and so for that given user, the value of the Analytics product to our customer wasn’t there,” said Ketchum.
Data deletion capabilities have also improved. These enable businesses to comply with deletion requests from users without removing unnecessary data. These features will also include a preview mode for businesses to verify the data they’re about to remove.
Analytics in a cookie-less future
As third-party cookies are phased out, Google anticipates that data sparsity will become the new norm. It will rely on machine learning to fill in the data gaps.
“We’ll have the ability to have different modes that may emphasize the user analysis side of it less. Yet, it will focus more on the behavioral,” he provided as an example.
Google Analytics 4 will be the default option when you set up a new property. The previous iteration will continue to remain available. Yet, Google recommends site owners set up both property types and run them in parallel. New feature development will be focused on GA4.
