y poll results: “Kicking & screaming” about GA4

We’ve received hundreds of responses in less than 24 hours since we launched our survey about your Google Analytics 4 preparedness. The poll will close soon, and we’ll do a detailed report. But the results so far — and the comments — have been very insightful.

Have your say: Are you ready for Google Analytics 4 yet? Take our poll to let us know what you think

What we have learned so far is summarized in the following way:

• GA4 is being used by more than twice as many users who say that they’re still learning to use it.
• The UI is hated by many. This is the most common comment. “I do not like the new interface. I don’t think it is intuitive.”
• The learning curve (“Learning was difficult. There are not many training sources that are easy to understand. ?”)

We’ve received a variety of comments from you. Positive, mixed, and negative. These comments have been edited to improve clarity and length.

Positive

• “GA4 has a slick new interface, and I love the new metrics for sites such as average engagement per second and engaged session. Engagement sessions are more informative than bounce rates, as they provide more insight. For example, if there were over 50% of engaged sessions instead of 80% or 90 bounce rate.
• It’s great that now SEOs can use their brains and analyze data. “GA4’s tracking is incredible.”
• Our team found GA4 better than Universal Analytics because it focused on events rather than a conglomeration of complex data that had no meaning. All of our clients have been happy with the new GA4 setup.

Mixed

• “I think GA4 is going to provide greater insight than UA in the future. It is frustrating that some of the changes in reporting are so arbitrary. “We will have a difficult time once UA has gone. Eliminating views, restrictions on how to use custom segments, and other changes that seem unnecessary are going make our lives more difficult.”
• I have mixed feelings towards GA4. I like the search function. But I do not find basic and simple reports available. “Not to mention the time lost on conversion tracking, and the changes in the calculations of our Buy to Details Rate and Cart To Detail Rate KPIs.”
• It’s a web analytics tool that has been shoehorned in an app analytics tool. It’s improving, they have added quite a few web metrics over the past little while, and now you can create a decent version of the traditional GA content and traffic reports if using Looker Studio.”
• The enhanced flexibility of GA4 is fantastic but it makes it more difficult to navigate.
• The next generation leaps for GA4 are the events tracking, collection creation and custom reports. GA4 would be better off with automated email report deliveries (like UA). “Fingers crossed that it will be added soon.”

Negative

• It is Google Analytics’ Windows Vista.
• It’s not the mass that isn’t prepared for GA4, but rather GA4 itself. It’s difficult to save reports, and you have to often rebuild them. It’s also very difficult to isolate the traffic volume for each channel, and even harder to compare channels year-over-year even though GA4 was set up nearly two years ago. It’s a mess.”
• “GA4 has become a reporting tool, not an analytical tool. It lacks the features that made Universal Analytics so interesting. We were supposed work more efficiently. We now lose a lot of time, and we need to consult budgets in order to create what used be standard.”
• It’s not easy, but it is free. The downgrade of our marketing leaders to the basic usage means that we must all learn what GA believes to be the “right” way to do things before we can finalize our work and pull out the data instead.
• “If not for the integration of other Google marketing tools, specifically Ads, and Optimize, we would have moved to another platform much more quickly. And now that Optimize will also be going away …”
• I haven’t heard any benefits of switching so we are now approaching July 1 with a scream.

Stay tuned for more information.

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