October 27, 2020 by Adrian Durow . Analytics
GA4 has been launched recently, to replace the current Universal Analytics property type.
New GA properties will be using GA4 as default. And eventually, Universal Analytics will most probably stop being supported and will be phased out. So it’s a good idea to setup a GA4 property now, and get stuck into those changes.
It’s actually been around for a while as a property type called: ‘Google Analytics App + Web’, which you may have noticed when you’ve come to setup a new property in GA. GA4 is an improvement on this. And it’s now the default option when setting up a new GA property.
1. AI-powered insights and predictions – it has alerts for surging demand for specific products. And predictions for outcomes. E.g. potential revenue from a sub-set of users.
2. Better audience insight with Google Ads – able to easier track across devices. E.g. user identified on web, but buys on mobile, so they can be taken off a retargeting list.
3. Customer life-cycle – more reporting & easier analysis for returning users and actions/conversions/purchases. All cross-device too.
4. Codeless event tracking – e.g. scrolls, & YouTube embeds are covered without additional tags (either on page or in GTM). Including some events too like file downloads. Obviously page views are covered as standard hits.
5. More granular user controls – to help marketers comply with GDPR.
6. Sustain analytics in cookie-less future – It’s become more difficult to collect user-data and associate it with event-data. And there is less user-consent generally these days. So, GA4 uses machine-learning to fill data gaps.
You’ll probably notice an ‘Upgrade to GA4’ option under the property settings:
IMPORTANT: Create a new GA property, so it runs alongside your existing property & views:
So you can get these new Google Analytics 4 reports populating with some data.
Go to your new GA4 property settings first. Click on Data Streams, where you should see your ‘Web’ data stream already setup:
Click on the data stream, and copy the Measurement ID:
Go to Google Tag Manager and setup a ‘Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration‘ tag. Not a ‘Google Analytics: Universal Analytics’ tag.
Enter the Measurement ID you’ve copied from your new GA4 property. Trigger this new tag on all pages. Preview it in Tag Assistant, then publish it:
For now, you should just get this setup, so it accumulates data – giving you a chance to get used to it, and figure out what’s different. What you can do. What you can’t do etc…
After publishing the tag in GTM, check for sessions in the Real Time reports, and click on ‘View user snapshot’ to get a feel for the events trigger in a randomly selected user’s journey:
