still stresses out marketers. Here’s why.

Having trouble with the migration from Universal Analytics (UA), to Google Analytics 4, (GA4)? Alex Lirtsman is the co-founder and CEO of Corral Data, a marketing/BI platform and also founder of Ready Set Rocket, a marketing agency. He has therefore seen how large and small companies handle the switchover.

We asked Alex about this and other topics related to GA4. Interview edited for clarity and length. )

Q: What do you think about GA4?

A :Bluntly Google really botched it this time. They had ample time to make GA4 perfect. You know, there was some last-minute rushing to add or fix things. It’s possible that they were aware of the fact that Universal Analytics was a mess when they promised to turn it off. They made GA4’s user experience less intuitive than UA.

I have two perspectives. One is that of a vendor for a data platform. We have 350 connectors. UA and GA4 is the top connector on our platform. 80% of my clients use UA and GA4. So, I’ve seen the stress caused by GA4. On the other hand, I am also a founder of a digital marketing agency and we see a similar thing with our clients.

MarTech GA4 experts: Dig deeper

Q. What’s the cause of stress?

A :Outside the core fundamentals, this is a totally different product. We tell marketers that it’s the same as going from CDs into a streaming service. In the past, a CD contained all of the music and was the equivalent to sessions. You could then go to a streaming service and choose the songs you wanted and create your own playlist. This is similar to events. Both create music but they have a different approach.

You can’t. You can export your UA and look at it on Sheets but not import it. We use a lot AI to pull both your UA data and GA4 into your data warehouse. When you do comparisons, we tell you to compare UA data with GA4 data. But it’s in the same warehouse. If you are on your own, export the data into Google Sheets and Excel to do your own comparisons.

Q. How have you handled the transition from GA4?

A :You’re right, I am shocked by how many companies have waited until the last minute to migrate. Still, they are worried about it. Since last year, we’ve had conversations with our clients about the switch. For our customers, it would be easy to just migrate them to GA4. This is a large part of what our team has been doing in the past year.

We get a lot of questions from brands on the enterprise side. They were unsure what GA4 would mean. Someone in the company logs into the system for the first and is like “What’s this?” Where is my old data?

Q. But UA had to be gone, right?

A. It had to be changed. Absolutely. We are in a world that is mobile-first, and we don’t deal with sessions any more. All events are based on an event. GA4 has a much more flexible interface, but I think it is also a better product. You can literally track each interaction, and then use it however you like. You get every part of the user’s stream and it’s available across all devices.

Marketers are used to doing things one way. The interface isn’t intuitive, and many of the old naming conventions are gone. For example, bounce rate is now engagement rate. You may have been doing the same thing as a marketer for ten years, but now you are forced to change. The naming conventions and reports are also different. It’s just a mental shift and a learning curve. Google could have been more persuasive about the benefits of this product.

A : That’s true. Free is useless if no one uses it. Some people will figure it out, and then they’ll use data, and work with agencies to create all of the reporting. Some people in UA will never use event-based analytics to make their decisions. We will lose some people who are not data-driven.

GA4 still stresses out marketers: here’s why first appeared on MarTech.