How to Use GA4 For Marketing

Are you a marketer? If you’ve never heard of GA4 or heard Google’s latest updates on Google Analytics 4, or you are existingly using Google Universal Analytics in your marketing, you’ve come to the right place. This article goes into great detail on “what is GA4”, “how to use GA4 for marketing,” and “difference between GA4 and Google Universal Analytics.”

To find out the answers to all of your questions, keep reading!

What is Google Analytics 4?

The most recent version of Google Analytics, generally known as GA4 (formerly known as “App + Web”), is used to watch consumer activity and gauge your marketing efforts both now and in the future. GA4, a web analytics tool, allows marketers to examine and quantify data from a website and an app, in contrast to Universal Analytics.

Differences in Google Universal Analytics & Google Analytics 4?

• Even though Google Universal Analytics was created to gather, analyze, and organize web data, the launch of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) gives marketers a brand-new viewpoint that considers all of the latest developments in digital marketing.
• The largest difference for marketers is that GA4 is an engagement-based approach rather than a session-based model. In other words, it counts GA4 events rather than hit kinds. You can correlate many user sessions and activities for a single user ID to provide a more accurate engagement picture.
• Marketers can observe the client lifecycle more comprehensively across channels with GA4’s help, and it also delivers more data and clever strategies for acting on web-specific insights.   

How To Configure Google Analytics 4? 

Adding the GA4 code to your website is the most crucial step. Remember that all Universal codes will stop collecting data as of July 2023. Set up your sources, channels, and page view monitoring today to ensure no interruption in data collection when the switchover occurs.

For Existing Users

To replace the Universal measuring ID you already have, you will need to create a new one. For this you have to do:

• Navigate to the Analytics page.
• Visit your administrator settings.
• Three columns will be displayed: Account, Property, and View.
• At the top of the Property column, click the Create Property button.
• Simply follow the on-screen instructions to set up your property (the app or website you wish to collect data for) and obtain a new measurement ID.
• To set up multiple properties, repeat these procedures. When using GA4, you’ll see that the Admin settings only display the Account and Property columns. Creating a new property, however, follows the same procedure.

For New Users

As an alternative, Google will prompt you to automatically create a GA4 measurement ID if you’re beginning with a brand-new Analytics account.

You are now prepared to use GA4 to gather data. Depending on your preferred approach, you can run the analytics directly on your website or use your new measurement ID to get set up in Google’s Tag Manager.

Google advises making use of Tag Manager. With GA4, you’ll discover that you can automate even more, but GA4 also functions flawlessly.

How to Improve GA4’s Data and Event Tracking

Because you can use the information, GA4 makes it worthwhile to capture more detailed data.

That does not imply that you should track every event’s potential parameter. Consider how to use GA4 in marketing to achieve definite objectives.

We’ll examine some of GA4’s most crucial features in this section and how you may enhance them using custom metrics.

1. Audience

GA4 has the ability to gather data in a much more detailed manner and help in determining your target audiences.

Audiences were exclusively utilized for advertisements in Universal, and you built distinct categories to characterize your organic users. You may use the same audience for advertisements and organic traffic; GA4 merely merges the two groups.

Based on user behavior and the customer journey, GA4 also enables you to develop considerably more specialized audiences. You might describe an audience as “those who watched a product video twice in a week and added an item to their cart in their next session,” for instance. We’re talking about personalization and targeting at that level!

2. Engagement Rate

Another advancement for GA4 is the engagement rate. It replaces the outdated bounce rate metric with a more precise and useful one.

The bounce rate is a well-liked indicator in Universal, although it has historically been unreliable. Universal already misses a lot of action. When a user navigates away from a website without taking any further action, it is recorded as a bounce. However, on those pages, people frequently take action; the activities are not documented.

GA4 resolves this issue by defining new engagement and bounce rates and tracking them separately.

Because they are better at determining true interest in a page, these indicators are more helpful than the outdated bounce rate. Bots are exempted, as they won’t stay on a page long enough or keep the tab open.

Engagement rate is a useful diagnostic tool for which pages are the most or least attractive to your users. As a tool for reporting on marketing goals, it is less useful. However, you should still avoid giving this measure too much weight, just like with the previous bounce rate.

3. Consumption of Content

Engagement time is a crucial GA4 metric since it measures how long a user remains interested in a page after achieving the minimal criteria for engagement.

But it’s not flawless. Users must continue to cause events for their involvement to be recorded, which results in some engagement being overlooked. For instance, GA4 assumes that users have ceased participating if they read a long-form post for 5 minutes but don’t click any links or scroll past the 90% mark. In reality, they are simply reading.

Fortunately, a solution has already been found in the form of a unique metric created by the company Kick Point, termed Content Consumption. For any other website, you may add this using Tag Manager or as a plugin for a WordPress website.

This is how it work, Based on the word count and ignoring other text on the page, Material Consumption calculates the length of time it will take to read a piece of Content.

A first event is fired when a user stays on the page for so long. When a user scrolls to the end of a piece of Content, a second event occurs. A third event occurs after the first two have occurred. It is noted that the user has digested that particular piece of Content.

This provides you with three important pieces of information: if your content engages viewers over time, whether they are reading it in its entirety, and whether they are meaningfully consuming it.

4. Acknowledgement

Most web marketers use Urchin tracking modules (UTMs) to track attribution for both paid and organic Content. They still function in GA4, but in a somewhat different way.

Link acquisition data is categorized into “channels” when it enters Universal, depending on the source and medium details in the UTM. The list of default channels and how they are defined have been altered in GA4.

The Other channel from Universal that you may recall has been renamed Unassigned. You should anticipate Google to continue adding more channels, such as Paid Social, Video, Audio, and Paid Shopping.

Conclusion

Analytics plays a major role in successful marketing. Marketers frequently complain when Google releases a new version. The new GA4, however, offers more data and improved privacy options, making it a genuinely valuable upgrade. Make sure you must understand, how to use GA4 in marketing and upgrade to the new analytics version right away to avoid being caught off guard in 2023.