Blog: Changing Google Analytics to GA4

Agency97 are a Chester-based leading independent digital agency that support organisations in achieving their online ambitions. They help through a range of services across consultancy, web design & build, digital marketing and on-going managed services.

Mike Lyons, Digital Strategist at Agency97 shares his 5 reasons why you should be upgrading your Google analytics account.

You should really be thinking about upgrading your Google Analytics to GA4, here are 5 reasons why –

1. Google Universal Analytics will no longer process data as of July 1st, 2023, but you will be able to access previously collected data for at least 6 months (according to Google).

Your data from Universal Analytics cannot be imported into GA4, so it is vital that you get GA4 setup as soon as possible to prevent any gaps in website/app performance data. Moving your tracking over to GA4 now means that you will have as much data as possible available in the platform when the switchover data comes around next year. In reason number 5 below we have provided some simple instructions on how to upgrade your Universal Analytics account to GA4.

2. GA4 offers enhanced measurement as standard, this means that the platform will automatically track several events such as downloads, video interactions, site searches etc.

This can help users save time as several tracking events will be automatically applied throughout the account (you can of course create custom events where needed).

The platform also offers ‘probabilistic matching’ in order to stitch together data from different sources to give you a complete picture of user behaviour. If you are for example running a campaign on both Facebook Ads and Google Ads, GA4 will use probabilistic matching to combine data from both campaigns to give you a single view on their performance.

3. GA4 offers a new and efficient analysis tool that Google have dubbed “Analysis Hub”.

This feature of GA4 is very powerful, enabling users to create custom reports using a drag and drop interface to add filters, segments, metrics and more. GA4 also offers the ability to export data into BigQuery for an even more in-depth analysis!

This part of the platform is an analysists dream and reports can be quickly created to send out to clients/team members, whilst being easily editable and further customised where needed.

4. Website and app engagement always used to be measured separately in Universal Analytics, but GA4 allows you to mix data from both your website and mobile apps. This means that you get one single data stream and can dig into data much more accurately.

A single view of engagement across all platforms will be fantastic news to a lot of businesses and it is very simple to set up - You simply add the same GA4 tracking ID to both your website and app, resulting in one place for you to manage all your data.

5. For anyone worried about the technicality of upgrading their Universal Analytics, the good news is that Google have made upgrading to GA4 as easy as possible. It is as simple as going into your Universal Analytics settings, clicking on the GA4 setup assistant, and then clicking “Get Started”.

There are only a couple of fields to fill in such as “property name” etc., but in most cases you can simply upgrade your current Analytics tag to the GA4 version, or if you use tag manager you just need to add the GA4 ID into your tag manager account.