Unveiling GA4: Elevating data-driven insights to level up your company’s marketing strategy

Although marketing and public relations typically involve a lot of writing and storytelling, statistics and data can help create a stronger narrative and showcase the value of otherwise qualitative measures. Behind every blog piece on a website, newsletter email or social post lies a plethora of data that reveals how an audience is engaging with and reacting to the content. One of the best tools companies can use to collect this treasure trove of information is Google Analytics (GA) tracking. 

Google Analytics is a free platform that tracks and reports website traffic and app data to provide insights and statistics on visitors to better understand the customer journey and improve marketing ROI. The platform has used a version of GA called Universal Analytics for many years, but starting July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing data, and all GA users will need to move over to Google’s new version: Google Analytics 4 (GA4). 

GA4 offers several new features that can help businesses gain deeper insights into their website or app’s performance and better understand the best marketing strategies to pursue. To help explain this updated analytics tracking, we’re sharing some of GA4’s new features and how they will benefit your company below. 

What’s changed from Universal Analytics to GA4? 

GA4 offers many new tools and features for marketers and business owners compared to Universal Analytics, but what exactly do those include? Some of our favorite and most beneficial updates are: 

1. Event tracking: GA4 provides enhanced event tracking capabilities, allowing companies to track a wider range of user interactions on any website or app, including scroll tracking, video engagement and file downloads. Previously, many of these interactions would be considered “hits” to a website, but the new GA4 system can break them down further into specific actions. 
2. Cross-device tracking: With GA4, users can track individual visitor behavior across multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets and desktop computers. This provides companies with a more complete picture of how visitors interact with their website and brand and creates more accurate statistics on website traction. 
3. Privacy-focused reporting: GA4 is focused on privacy and includes features like data minimization, IP anonymization and user deletion requests, which can help companies stay compliant with data protection laws across the world like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

What are some of the statistic changes in reporting?

With all of these new changes to Google Analytics, many companies may see a change in the statistics and numbers shared within regular analytics reports. From a tracking and reporting standpoint at Pierce PR, we have a few new statistics we’re changing or adding to our regular reports, including: 

1. Average session duration to user engagement: Where previously average session duration would measure visitor engagement in terms of time spent on a page, the new GA4 version is able to determine how much a visitor engages with a page (ex. if they scroll to continue reading) versus how much time they spend with a particular page open on their browser. 
2. Hits to views and event counts: Hits have notoriously been known to monitor website traffic based on the number of physical resources requested from a server, which could include how many images, text sections or audio files are downloaded to load an individual page (not that they’re necessarily being viewed). In GA4, hits instead turn into views (the number of pages seen during a visit) and event counts (each triggered event and the number of times each event was triggered in the last 30 minutes by users or the website or app). 
3. Sessions to engaged sessions: Universal analytics measures sessions as the number of times someone opens and begins poking around on a website or app. Engaged sessions, on the other hand, are the number of sessions that last longer than 10 seconds, have a conversion event or have two or more screen or page views. 
4. Bounce rates to engagement rates: Typically, bounce rates, the percentage of sessions that are not engaged, were reported within Universal Analytics. Instead, GA4 measures the opposite statistic, or the engagement rates, which track the percentage of engaged sessions on a website or mobile app. 

Overall, GA4 offers several new features that can help companies gain deeper insights into their website or apps’ performances and better understand customer journeys from start to finish. While analytics reports may look a little different in the near future, GA4 will help create a more cohesive story of users visiting any given website. For more information or for any questions regarding this change in analytics reporting, reach out to our team at hello@pierce-pr.com. 

Bri Carlesimo is a senior account manager at Pierce PR. She can be reached at bri@pierce-pr.com.