What do marketers need to know about the switch?
“In practical terms there are two related angles to address around data collection and then the reporting and analysis of that data.
“For data collection, the situation is the same for free and paid versions. You simply must migrate from Universal Analytics to GA4 if you want to continue to collect data beyond the deadline, which means deploying the new version onto your website and/or into your mobile apps. Most organisations will want to run the two systems in parallel to baseline any differences and take the opportunity while implementing to review and optimise the quality and relevance of the data they are collecting.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
“For reporting and analysis, the practical situation depends somewhat on whether you are using the free or the 360 (paid) version. 360 customers can already get their data piped into BigQuery from Universal Analytics, which enables them to continue to access their historical data after the switch-off date in raw form and gives scope to build reporting that integrate the old and new worlds for trending.
“Free version customers gain BigQuery export capability with GA4, but critically don’t have it as an option for Universal Analytics. That means any information they don’t manually export (by downloading reports or using the reporting API to take different cuts of the underlying data) will no longer be available at some point and building reporting that can trend across the old and new worlds will be much higher effort and require a lot of skill and planning.
“GA4 does bring a lot of useful new functionality, with much better funnel/pathing analysis and the ability to have a single view of web and mobile app engagement to name two.
“However an equally important reality is that Google Analytics is one of the most widespread digital analytics tools in existence, which thousands of marketers have learned over many years to use effectively. And the value of data is only realised in its interpretation and ability to action.