3 Reasons Why GA4 Outperforms UA

One of the problems with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is that it’s hard to use. Other complaints sound like people want Universal Analytics (UA) back. The time when UA was made, however, was very different from now. There were not many rules about how to collect and use people’s data online. It also had a lot of problems and blind spots that marketers either didn’t notice or didn’t know about.

It was made so that GA4 could deal with privacy problems and fix those bugs. There are three things about GA4 that make it better than GA3.

1. Not sessions but events.

UA only tracked visits, not conversations. It’s not useful to measure visits. It doesn’t matter if you had 5,000,000 visits in a month if 4,990,000 of them didn’t do anything that made you money. You can find the 10,000 guests, find out what they did, and find out where they came from with GA4.

Sharon Mostyn said at The Martech Conference, “GA4 records and stores interactions with your website or app as events. These events give you information about what’s going on.” “It really tells you what’s going on with your site, whether it’s button clicks, page views, or system events.”

In GA4, events are called conversions, and they can be taken care of immediately. What is a change? Whatever you choose is important for the group. Because every business is different, you need to be able to change what you measure to fit your needs.

“It can auto-track things like video engagement,” Mostyn said. “Things like rates at which videos start, stop, and finish.” During that whole time, it will tell you what percentage of the movie has been watched. It’s more important to know when people left a long video than a short one.

That’s also true for other types of information. It can track file downloads for business-to-business sites, so you can see not only what files were downloaded but also from what page they were downloaded.

2. How to measure mobile and app use and more.

Metrics can only tell you so much about a website. To get a full picture, you need to track conversations on phones and apps, which UA couldn’t do. It can also find out what offline things are bringing people in.

User and traffic reports are the two kinds of purchase reports that GA4 has. Mostyn said, “User acquisition is the first time that user came to your site.” “How did they get in?” When it comes to paid search, the default straight unknown is what happens most of the time. The same is true for organic search and organic social.

The time the person came to your site is shown by traffic capture.

“This is often used for advertising in person.” Mostyn said, “Promotions like TV and radio spots will help you figure out where that traffic is coming from and what’s going on with that.” “You can divide your audience into groups to find out where your valuable traffic is coming from.”

3. AI and cross-platform

Georgia 4 has a tool called “user-ID” that lets you connect your own IDs to specific users so you can see how they behave across sessions and devices and platforms.

According to Mostyn, this cross-platform interaction brings together all the data about a customer so that they can see the whole picture across all devices, platforms, and online events.

If this was the only thing GA4 did, it would still be a useful tool, especially since it was free. In addition to that, it does a lot more by analyzing the data with AI.

Mostyn said, “You can use that machine learning to make powerful audience insights, such as access to predictive metrics, segmentation, and data-driven targeting.” “Data-driven targeting lets you use those insights and audiences across channels by taking advantage of the direct connections to platforms for buying media.”

That’s a big improvement over UA.