How to Use Google Analytics 4 for Marketing

Do you use analytics to measure your marketing? Are you prepared for the shutdown of Google Universal Analytics?

In this article, you’ll discover how to use Google Analytics 4 to continue tracking consumer behavior and measuring your marketing now and into the future.

Google Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4: What's Happening?

Google is notorious for closing down products suddenly—from ambitious moonshot projects to beloved apps. But at least this time, they’ve given us plenty of notice.

Universal Analytics will stop receiving web traffic data on July 1, 2023. This means on that day, even if you still have Universal Analytics set up on your website, it won’t work anymore. Your Universal page will still exist but there won’t be any data to see. And by the end of 2023, you’ll no longer be able to access Universal at all.

Here’s what Google has to say about it:

“In today's measurement landscape, businesses need to navigate new challenges to understand the complex, multi-platform journeys of their customers—all while prioritizing user privacy.”

Long story short: analytics need to get better at privacy and attribution. 

Universal Analytics has been having privacy issues for a while. Many states and countries have introduced new privacy laws, such as the GDPR in Europe. The GDPR has very strict rules about exporting or processing the data of European Union citizens outside the EU, which makes it harder for Universal to show you information about your web traffic.

There are also problems with accuracy and attribution. In 2022, about 20% of internet users have an ad blocker installed, which means that Universal can’t collect data about their behavior online. Competing web browsers have started to offer stronger privacy features to attract new users.

Result: the only really accurate attribution data comes from people who use the Chrome browser and don’t have ad blockers. That’s a much smaller pool of data. 

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) aims to solve these problems with more flexible tracking, granular data, and simpler setup. But first, you’ll need to make the switch.

What You Need to Do Today: Set Up Google Analytics 4

In the next few sections of this guide, we’ll talk about what makes GA4 valuable to marketers and its clever new features. Let’s start with the basics. The most important thing is to get the GA4 code onto your website. Remember, from July 2023, any Universal code will simply stop collecting data. You want to get your sources, channels, and page view tracking all set up now so that there’s no gap in data collection when the changeover happens.

It’s unclear whether Google will make it easier for people to link their Universal and GA4 accounts; at the moment, there are no guarantees. Instead, you’ll need to generate a new measurement ID yourself, to replace the Universal measurement ID that you already have. Here’s how to do it: 

• Go to your Analytics page.
• Go to your Admin settings. 
• You’ll see three columns: Account, Property, and View.
• Click the Create Property button at the top of the Property column. 
• Follow the prompts to set up your property (the app or website you want to collect data for) and get a new measurement ID.

You can repeat these steps to set up multiple properties. Once you’re using GA4, you’ll notice that the Admin settings will only show two columns: Account and Property. But the steps to create a new property are the same. 

Alternatively, if you’re starting out with a new Analytics account altogether, Google will prompt you to create a GA4 measurement ID automatically. You’re now ready to collect data with GA4. You can either run the analytics directly on your website or use your new measurement ID to get set up in Google’s Tag Manager, whichever method you prefer.

Google recommends using Tag Manager. You’ll find that you can use it to automate even more with GA4, but GA4 also works perfectly fine on its own. 

Why You Need to Set Up GA4 Now

So… It’s time we asked the obvious question.

Why should you go to all this effort, especially when Universal will still be around until 2023? What’s so great about GA4? 

There are two key reasons:

1. Switching now means that you can collect more data in GA4 before your Universal data disappears. 
2. GA4 can track more data, and more flexibly, than Universal.

Let’s examine those in more detail.

Switching to GA4 now means that you’ll accumulate plenty of data before your Universal account goes blank. If you wait until July 2023, you’ll have to start from scratch.

If you want to keep your old data from Universal, you’ll need to export your account history to a data warehouse such as BigQuery. You can use Google’s Looker Studio to compare datasets from Universal with GA4.

But honestly, the easier solution is to start using GA4 now so you have lots of data built up by 2023 and you don’t need to retain your Universal analytics. 

Now here comes the good part. GA4 collects more data, offers better management tools, and even incorporates machine learning. It’s about to make marketers’ lives much easier. 

In the old Universal service, you can track events, defining them by the dimensions of category, action, and label. Each dimension has a scope that defines how long the information is valid—for example, the length of a user’s session on your website. The scope for each dimension of an event has to be the same; otherwise, your data gets mixed up.

Confused yet? So are most Universal users. The complexity of the different data types in Universal makes it very difficult to compare and combine different pieces of information.

GA4 takes a very simple approach. In GA4, every piece of data is called a “hit.” You can combine and compare every last scrap of data because everything is just a hit.

This means that you can track an event—for example, clicks to play a video—with up to 50 different individual parameters. Tracking in that much detail in Universal would require a complex, time-consuming setup. In GA4, each different parameter can be measured, viewed, reported, and compared with others.