On Wednesday Google announced the new brand in analytics world – Google Analytics 4. My best guess for logic behind this version numbering goes like this: Urchin, classic GA, Universal Analytics and now Google Analytics 4. I really like the new features, like predictive metrics, anomaly detection and automatic / custom alerts, which enables more advanced analysis and action. In this post I’m summarizing a couple of key things and sharing a collection of other resources.
“As we all probably agree, this development was and is much needed in the current privacy-centric, cross-device, cross-channel and machine learning powered world.”
Petri Mertanen
Getting started with Google Analytics 4
If you want to jump in right away and start testing the new GA4, here’s a support document for you. Check out Krista Seiden’s blog post and walkthrough video of the GA4 user interface below.
More details and technical stuff
If you want to see a nice list of Google Analytics 4 (previously Google Analytics App+Web) compared to Universal Analytics, take a look at Paul Koks’ blog post starting from data model and streams up to BigQuery and other integrations. If you are an analyst, Ken Williams has a dedicated blog for Google Analytics 4. And of course, if you’re a practitioner or analytics developer, you need to check out this Simo’s blog post about getting started with Google Tag Manager.
Going beyond digital analytics
One really cool thing, in my opinion, is the free BigQuery export to all customers / users! You can read about the integration from Charles Farina’s blog post. Another really nice post from him, with lots of Google Analytics 4 screenshots explained is found here. At the moment, many companies have their marketing data spread all around in different systems. With GA4 BigQuery export AND Supermetrics BigQuery product, you are able to create Marketing Data Warehouse in no time! I will be talking about this and Marketing Mix Modelling during the Marketing Analytics Summit on Tuesday, November 10. If you are interested in joining the event, check out the agenda and feel free to send me a message to receive the discount code.