Q&A with Google Analytics Director: Getting Started With Google Analytics 4

This concludes our series on how to get started with Google Analytics 4. We will be chatting with Russ Ketchum (director of Google Analytics). He discusses migrating to Universal Analytics and shares some GA4-power user moves.

MarTech: What’s the most important information you need to know about migrating UA to GA4 from MarTech?

Russ Ketchum: GA4’s core is very different to Universal Analytics — and that’s intentional. Page views and sessions were not concepts that were familiar before Google Analytics. They worked well for website analytics. The world has changed. The internet is not synonymous with a desktop website. We live in an internet-connected world. GA4 has built GA4 to measure that. Streams, events and partial data are all part of today’s connected world.

This is a huge leap for many customers. We are committed to helping our customers make this transition as smooth as possible by providing them with migration tools, videos, educational content, and other support.

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MT: Power user moves for GA4?

RK: It’s a great question. Two things I will highlight are one that makes it easier for customers to migrate and another that highlights the big improvements we made in GA4 based upon customer feedback.

One of the first things customers should think about when migrating to GA4 is how they will get the data that they are most concerned into the system. Universal Analytics is limited in its ability to measure events. It only allows you to create a category, an action, and a label to identify a specific interaction. GA4 allows customers to create as many events and as many parameters as they wish.

Many people ask us how to transition from one world to another. According to our experience, the easiest way is “without writing any new code for your website.” Google tag makes it easy to do this. You’ll see the option to “Collect Universal Analytics Events” in GA4 under your stream tag settings. This will create a single GA4 event type that records Category/Action/Label as parameters. This will confirm that it is working. You can check the Events section in Configure.

The Pro move is to click on the “Create Event” button. This allows you to create rules that will allow you to split-out the legacy event into native GA4 events. You can, for example, make “Category” your GA4 event name. “Action” and label some parameters. With all the power of GA4, businesses can now analyze their users’ actions.

Once you’ve gathered the data they are most interested in, here’s a tip: Customize reports to help them focus on the important things.

GA4 offers a unique feature called report customization. This is a feature Universal Analytics has been asking for since long. Customers can customize all of the default reports and even replace the entire set with something entirely unique to suit their specific business needs.

MT: Which topics do you have the most questions about?

RK: It’s quite wide at the moment. We have many customers in the setup phase, so they are asking lots of questions about how to best structure their properties and events. We made a significant investment in the Setup Assistant to make it as simple as possible for customers to transition from UA to Google Analytics 4.

Customers who are experts in Universal Analytics have also joined us and they’re now learning how to apply their knowledge to GA4. This audience has already seen a lot of educational content, and we are excited to launch more in 2023.

MT: Will GA4 comply with EU privacy laws

RK: Google Analytics is unique because the data is owned by our customers, not Google. We have an obligation to give our customers the tools and controls they need to comply to regulations in all countries, not just the EU. We have introduced more precise privacy controls over the last few months and will continue to improve as needed.

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These concerns are being addressed in GA4, but Universal Analytics doesn’t offer the same flexibility. This makes it even more crucial that customers migrate to GA4 as soon as possible.

MT: Will Universal Analytics’ sunset date be changed to July next year?

RK: We understand that many customers find the transition to GA4 a difficult one. We made two announcements recently to help make the transition to GA4 easier. We first announced an update of our Setup Assistant that will “Jumpstart” our customers on their path to GA4 through the creation of a GA4 property, and automatically carrying over the settings from the Universal Analytics properties.

We announced that Analytics 360 accounts are complex and large in scale, so we’ll be moving their sunset date to July 1, 20,24. Both updates are intended to assist customers in preparing for the migration to GA4, utilizing as much historical data as possible and customizing as possible.

MT: In which areas can we expect to see new features or updates?

RK: SMB customers can get even more value from the customization options I mentioned earlier. There are many big plans for Advertiser Workspace.

Get started with Google Analytics 4

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MarTech first published the post Q&A With Google Analytics’ Director: Getting Started With Google Analytics 4.