Why set up Google Analytics 4 and what is it?

What information does Google Analytics 4 provide?

In this service, you can see which pages are the most popular, how much time a person spends on the site, at what stages they leave the site, and many other factors. This knowledge can help webmasters to adapt their resource to users and understand their needs. Google Analytics provides a wide range of tools for data analysis and is a necessary analytics service for any promotion of a new website or an existing one.

What is the difference between Google Analytics 4 and 3?

Google Analytics 4 is a new version of the analytical tool that differs significantly from the previous ones, because Google is always trying to improve its services for users and website owners.

GA 4 differs from the previous version, known as Universal Analytics (UA) or GA3, in some key ways:

1. Focus: Previously, Google analytics services were focused on tracking user sessions, while GA4 offers us a different model – tracking key actions such as clicks, video views, form completions, and more.
2. User identification: Google analytics 4 makes it easier and better to identify users, even if they use different devices to interact with your brand. These results are achieved thanks to the new “user ID” identifier, which allows you to link user data when they interact with your brand on different platforms or from different gadgets. It sounds a little scary, but it doesn’t mean that website owners are spying on their users, it’s just a way to improve web resources and make them more and more convenient for people.
3. Integration with other Google services: GA4 allows you to use and integrate other Google products such as Google Ads, Firebase, and Google BigQuery. This provides a more complete understanding of the effectiveness of the marketing strategy.
4. Improved privacy and security: the new version of Google Analytics pays more and more attention to protecting user data (so you shouldn’t be afraid that someone is watching you) and complying with privacy rules. This is a very important factor that affects the trust of users and allows them to provide their personal information without consequences.

How does Google Analytics learn and develop?

Another interesting detail that was added to the fourth version of Google Analytics is machine learning and human behavior analytics. These tools are used to better understand and optimize web resources for users. Let’s take a closer look:

• Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn from data and experience. In the context of Google Analytics 4, machine learning is used to automatically identify patterns and regularities in people’s behavior, which allows you to predict their next actions.
• Audience-based analytics is an approach that analyzes user behavior and their characteristics (demographic data, traffic sources, behavioral factors, technological characteristics, and human actions on the site). After that, a separate audience is created, i.e. a portrait of a person, and their values are determined in order to provide them with the most relevant information and change the site depending on the needs of a particular audience. This system can also create patterns and trends in user behavior and change the marketing strategy to achieve better results.

Events in Google Analytics 4

Events in Google Analytics 4 are user interactions on your website or mobile app that you want to track and analyze. It can be any action that you consider important to your business. Here are some key points related to actions in GA4:

1. Types of events: there are 4 main types:
   • Predicted events are standard metrics that Google Analytics provides, such as page views, adding an item to the cart, completing a purchase, interacting with a video, and more. 
   • Custom events are events that allow you to evaluate metrics that are specific to your business, such as clicking on the “sign up” button, filling out a feedback form, or interacting with interactive elements. Such metrics allow you to more accurately determine user behavior and track specific actions. 
   • Parameterized events contain additional parameters or metadata that supplement the information about the event. For example, such data may contain additional information about the user, the context, or the action they took on the site. 
   • Conversion usually indicates the successful completion of a goal on your website. For example, it can be a completed purchase, filling out a request form, or subscribing to a newsletter. Conversion tracking allows you to better understand the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, and with the new options in Google Analytics 4, this process is becoming more useful and easier.
2. Event analysis: After Google Analytics 4 has tracked all the events, you can analyze them in the reports it provides. You can see the number of these events, the time between them, conversion funnels, and much more. This will help you understand how users interact with content and your site, and what actions lead to successful outcomes.
3. User experience optimization: after the analysis, you can safely make adjustments to the site design, navigation, content, or technical settings, because you will already understand what your customers like and bring success and what does not.

Google Analytics for SEO

SEO is very appreciative of various analytics services, and when they are free, it’s a holiday. In search engine optimization, Google Analytics 4 plays a significant role, and you’re about to find out why:

• Traffic tracking: Google analytics allows you to track the source of traffic and analyze this value. This allows you to optimize your marketing strategy and what aspects to improve to increase conversions.
• Keyword analysis: With the help of Google analytics reports, you can understand which keywords attract the most users to your website. This allows you to optimize your website content and keyword promotion strategy.
• Study of user behavior: the behavioral factor is a very important element of SEO analytics, so experts pay attention to this indicator and make changes depending on how users behave on the site. Analyzing such data allows you to understand how relevant the content is and how interesting it is for readers.
• Mobile analytics: recently, a lot of traffic has been coming from the mobile version of the site, so GA4 helps to understand what percentage of users are accessing the site from gadgets. And SEO specialists understand whether it is worth analyzing the mobile version even better.

Conclusion

Google Analytics has evolved significantly with its update, and the new fourth version provides quite a few useful and high-quality tools for analyzing user behavior, the quality of the marketing strategy, and website performance. Some of these changes are aimed at improving the user experience, and some are made to make it easier for site owners to understand the quality of their work. Google always strives to do everything possible to improve its services for users, and this time they have succeeded 100%.