What's the deal Google Analytics?

This gets confusing real fast, so buckle up for some background:

What's the deal with web analytics?

Web analytics is the discipline of using data collected on websites and in apps to optimize a user experience. This is done by tracking the ways that users interact with your website or app, which are called a "property" in analytics-speak (though multiple websites can feed into the same property, it gets complicated.)

There are a few tools that have been used to do this, but the previous market leader, and new market leader are both created by Google. These are called, as you might have guessed, Google Universal Analytics, and Google Analytics 4 (GA4), respectively.

You may have heard about these two recently, because everybody is currently in the process of switching over to GA4.

What is Universal Analytics?

Universal Analytics is Google's previous version of web analytics. It is a suite of tools for measuring and tracking users interactions with a website.

Universal Analytics is rendered obsolete by the introduction of GA4. It will stop functioning in July of 2023.

What is Google Analytics 4?

In short, GA4 is simply the successor to Universal Analytics, with some new tools added and some old ones missing. It track's users in very different ways, and allows new kinds of insights to be drawn, with less work on the backend.

The big positives of this new suite of tools are

• Cross-platform compatibility, so you can understand a users experience from an app on their phone to a desktop computer.
• User Journey tracking, so you can see the paths users take through your website, how they become conversions, and how you might be able to optimize their experience.

In my opinion, these two changes are the most impactful, as they allow a deeper understanding of how users see and use your website.

Why is GA4 replacing Universal Analytics?

GA4 is Google's answer to the many privacy concerns leveled at web analytics. Some of which are legal, coming from the European Union's new law, commonly called GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation.

This increased pressure towards preserving consumer privacy has led to major web browsers, including Google Chrome (at some point), to begin blocking third-party cookies. Universal Analytics relied on these cookies, but GA4 does not.