tips to help you transition smoothly from UA to Ga4

Google’s Universal Analytics will end on July 1, 2018. Google Analytics 4 will replace UA in less than two months.

Colleen Harris is the head of Sincro’s business intelligence and reporting strategies. She said, “It can feel overwhelming.” “We can bury our heads in the sand, but we have to decide what comes next.” Here’s the truth: We will have to make this transition.

MarTech and Harris – aka the Google Whisperer – created our Getting started with GA4 series to help. She’s back to share more tips and insights about GA4.

First things first

Talk to your website providers and agencies to find out what they plan to do with GA4. Does your website provider or agency support GA4? When will they support it? Ask each vendor with whom you do business what their GA4 support model will be. Your vendors will charge you for GA4 setup, or is it included in a package deal?

Dig deeper: 3 ways to do segmentation in Google Analytics 4

What is the URL?

Harris stated that the most common GA4 question he gets is “How do I remove page title because I cannot tell what’s happening in any of these reports?”

This is the section. The default identifier for the page is the title. This is not the URL.

Harris says that this is great for websites with six or seven pages which are static and where you don’t have to worry about what they’re doing. The page title is meaningless to many of us. In the example below, I have three different URLs but the title of the page is the same. I can’t tell the difference.

add the Page Path dimension in your report. The value that follows the domain is the Page Path. For example, if someone visits www.example.com/Bags, then example.com is the domain and Bags is the page path.

Unfiltered GA4

GA4 doesn’t allow you to customize filters. You cannot use filters to filter traffic based on IP addresses, traffic sources, locations, or any other previously used filters.

Harris said that when you compare Universal Analytics to GA4, filters will be the only thing not performing up to standard. It’s actually really bad in GA4. This means that the filters we have set up in UA won’t carry over to GA4. In GA4, you can only exclude domain names. This is the biggest change when making this transition.”

Tip: Move your domain filters to the top of the list.

No views to see

You’ll notice that there is something missing when you visit the admin page in GA4. The UA version had three columns, whereas GA4 only has two. The Views column has disappeared.

“When people see the third column gone, they are scared because everyone is used to working within a view. Everyone had a different view. Both the paid search vendor and social media vendor had their views. “You could have up to six different views of UA.”

In UA, you can customize your data by using filters and views. GA4 only has one view of your data. Data streams are used to populate this view. Your data streams come from your website, apps or data streams. Every vendor (advertising agency, website, and SEO) uses the same data.

You can then decide what information and trends are important. The data will tell you what is happening and what needs to be done. So, everyone can have the same goals.

Google Analytics 4: Getting Started

Watch the complete series:

The article 4 tips for a smooth transition from UA to GA4 first appeared on MarTech.