The Next Generation of Intelligence

This October Google unveiled a new version of Google Analytics (Analytics 4), featuring "machine learning at its core”. What exactly does Analytics 4 mean to marketers and business owners?

To quote Google: "To help you get better ROI from your marketing for the long term, we're creating a new, more intelligent Google Analytics that builds on the foundation of the App + Web property we introduced last year. The new Google Analytics is now the default experience for all new properties and is where we’re investing in future improvements.”

Enhanced Monitoring - Enhanced trend monitoring is the key evolution.  The new Analytics can automatically alert users to significant changes in their data. Data points such as “churn probability” can assist with how to more efficiently invest in retaining customers to use marketing budgets more efficiently.

Prediction - For eCommerce enabled sites the advanced reporting tools will provide some powerful insights, such as new predictive metrics that can forecast potential revenue you can earn from a particular group of customers. This allows businesses to create higher value audiences and run analyses to better understand why some customers are likely to spend more than others.

Advertising Audiences - With Analytics 4 you can create audiences for Google Ads, based on your Analytics data, and reach more focused customer segments, aligning with trends. You can also measure App and web interactions together, which means that you can monitor conversions from, say, YouTube video views alongside conversions from Google Display, and Google Remarketing campaigns.

You can also include organic channels, like Google Search, social, and email, within these comparisons, providing more insight into your broader marketing efforts.

Reports - Google has simplified and re-organized reporting so that you can find marketing insights based on what part of the customer journey you are most interested in. This gives you more ways to dig into the data, and hone in on specific trends.

No Cookies - No Worries - The new data points have been designed "to adapt to a future with or without cookies or identifiers". Given increased data regulation, tracking via cookies is slowly being phased out, which means that businesses need new ways to monitor and attribute audience activity. The new Analytic 4 tool and Google's data collection tools will attribute activity without the use of cookie tracking.

Converting Existing Analytics - You can set up Google Analytics 4 (formerly known as App and Web Property) with your existing Universal Analytics property.  This article helps you set up a Google Analytics 4 property that collects data from the same pages as an existing Universal Analytics property.

Bottom Line: Google 4 is the new future of Google Analytics and definitely worth exploring. On the detail oriented subject of analytics, Google provides incredible value to business owners looking to gain useful insights on their customers and competition, and to determine the efficiency of your advertising spend. Measure everything you can - the more you look, the more likely you are to find!