GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4: Are you ready?
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 5:42 am
The next generation of Google Analytics has arrived, Google Analytics 4. This GA4 release brings us a new data model, new reports, and capabilities that give more power to our favorite analytics tool.
Table of contents
How does Google Analytics work?
Main changes in the new version
How does Google Analytics work?
Google Analytics 4 brings with it a major change in the way of measuring, as it would be a union of the two Google measurement platforms: Google Analytics (based on hits/interactions) and Firebase (based on events). And this last event-based data model, such as a pageview, is what is now used in GA4 for measurement.
To summarize, GA4 is the adoption of Firebase as the main data model, adding the web and the measurement protocol. With a completely renewed user interface and other capabilities that Firebase did not have.
Main changes in the new version
We have a revamped user interface with new architectural industry mailing list options. For example, new real-time reports, more funnel reports and pathing reports (which allow you to see how people travel through your website and application with a tree graph) to analyze your traffic in much more detail.
Google Analytics 4
Another change is the improvement in debugging. This feature comes from Firebase, since we didn't have it in Google Analytics Universal and until now we substituted it with Google Tag Manager. If we enable the Preview of our Google Tag Manager container, the data will be transmitted in real time to this DebugView report. Thus, we can see in Analytics the chronological order of the events that took place on our website/app.
Google Analytics
There are still many functions to be developed. Therefore, it would be interesting to gradually migrate data, working with Google Analytics and GA4. This way, we will be able to continue interpreting and analyzing data in Google Analytics and at the same time collect data in GA4 to be able to have a history when the GA4 scenario becomes a reality as the only measurement platform.
Table of contents
How does Google Analytics work?
Main changes in the new version
How does Google Analytics work?
Google Analytics 4 brings with it a major change in the way of measuring, as it would be a union of the two Google measurement platforms: Google Analytics (based on hits/interactions) and Firebase (based on events). And this last event-based data model, such as a pageview, is what is now used in GA4 for measurement.
To summarize, GA4 is the adoption of Firebase as the main data model, adding the web and the measurement protocol. With a completely renewed user interface and other capabilities that Firebase did not have.
Main changes in the new version
We have a revamped user interface with new architectural industry mailing list options. For example, new real-time reports, more funnel reports and pathing reports (which allow you to see how people travel through your website and application with a tree graph) to analyze your traffic in much more detail.
Google Analytics 4
Another change is the improvement in debugging. This feature comes from Firebase, since we didn't have it in Google Analytics Universal and until now we substituted it with Google Tag Manager. If we enable the Preview of our Google Tag Manager container, the data will be transmitted in real time to this DebugView report. Thus, we can see in Analytics the chronological order of the events that took place on our website/app.
Google Analytics
There are still many functions to be developed. Therefore, it would be interesting to gradually migrate data, working with Google Analytics and GA4. This way, we will be able to continue interpreting and analyzing data in Google Analytics and at the same time collect data in GA4 to be able to have a history when the GA4 scenario becomes a reality as the only measurement platform.