Amidst all the chaos of 2020, you might have failed to notice that Google gave us all a Christmas present. It’s called Google Analytics 4.

Seriously, I’d rather have had the Google Ads search terms back.

Now GA4 as its friends (and also its parents; Google have gotten lazy with the naming right from the off) call it is, if we’re sticking with that metaphor, one of those Christmas presents where it takes so long to put together that you can’t actually use it until about April. Or the kind where the delivery gets held up on some of it so you just have to awkwardly give the recipient the bits you do have, and promise the rest is coming. Basically it’s not ready yet and a lot of staple features are missing.

But when it’s finally assembled, it’s going to be a pretty excellent present. We’re all busy people so read on for a quick rundown of all the important bits, and if there’s anything that’s still a bit mysterious by the end, contact us for help with your GA4 setup.

What is GA4, exactly?

No prizes for guessing that this is the 4th version of Google Analytics, but in real terms this is a ground-up rebuild of the Google Analytics we know and love. Sort of. What it really does is adapt Firebase (which has been the app-tracking platform of choice in the Google sphere for a while now) to give us website data too. Clever.

This moves us from using data split into pageviews and events into one that’s all events (you still get pageviews but they’re considered a kind of event, don’t panic), and this means Google can make much more sense behind the scenes of what’s happening, which gives us more info to work with too. You know how some data columns just aren’t allowed in some reports in GA right now? There should be less of that, for a start.

The app bit of Firebase hasn’t gone away either. Now you can have your brand’s data across all your websites and apps in one place, and still break it down to see the platforms you want if you don’t want all of it. The initial GA4 rollout was literally called ‘App + Web’, which sums it up.

Rather than just a superficial change to the way data’s processed, this adds tons of functionality too and most of it is just the human, behavioural info we’ve wanted about our site visitors for years now but that creaky 15-year-old GA1-through-3 architecture has struggled to give us. Again — it’s not finished, but when it is there’s going to be a really exciting set of possibilities.

Sounds great. Should I jump straight on it now then?

Yes, but actually no.

GA4 is missing some of its shiny new features, it also has some pretty glaring omissions from Universal Analytics (GA3) too. So the smart money’s on creating a GA4 and feeding it all your data as soon as possible, but expecting to stick with GA3 for a fair while yet because there are plenty of things you can only do there. Ecommerce tracking has a lot missing, to name one, and you know how we feel about that at BFBC.

Even if you build a brand-new website tomorrow, set it up with GA3 and GA4; they don’t get in each other’s way at all (unless you’re doing cross-domain tracking, then you have to be careful) and then you have the features you need now as well as a fully-stocked GA4 with all your data in from the earliest point you possibly can.

Got it. Wait a minute- I just got used to GA3, do I have to learn it all again?

Not really. The names of reports and where they’re kept have moved around, but honestly you won’t know the difference after a while:

Here’s the old-faithful Behaviour -> Site Content -> All Pages report in GA3:

Now let’s look at Engagement -> Pages and Screens in GA4:

It looks a bit different but it’s the same thing, right? In fact, if you change the top right dropdown menu to include page path rather than page title, you pretty much get back to where you were before. The reason for the name change (pages and screens) is so you can see app screens in the same report if you want, but that’s still really easy to temporarily filter out if that’s what you’re after.

The graphs above the standard tables are much more useful too, rather than just that line of users vs. days we’ve all tolerated for our whole careers. The GA4 report loads in with users, engaged time (the clever new version of time on page which accounts pages for being open in another tab/when the user is away from their computer) and other stuff that’s actually useful, rather than the GA3 mishmash which now I look back at it is a bit sad.

It’s lots better, without being too different.

Okay, panic over. How do I install it then?

This bit’s pretty unchanged too- you add a code snippet or two to your website, or if you want to do it the really clever way, all the tags you’d need are already in Google Tag Manager. And if you’re not doing most of your tracking through GTM, it’s worth thinking about making the change; GTM can go way beyond the basics much more easily than adding code to your website.

Know your way around GTM? The GA4 bits are exactly where you’d expect them.

Don’t know your way? You know where to find us.

There is a pretty significant difference on the setup within GA itself: in GA3, we were used to the hierarchy of ‘stuff’ being Account -> Property -> View. In GA4, Views have gone away leaving us with just the first two, and we split out our data with clever filters. Have you got one of those “exclude internal traffic” views in your GA3? You can just toggle the data in and out of your reports in real-time, which is genius and much lower-stakes than the old “once you filter it, it’s gone forever” approach of GA3. With that said, filters are super-limited right now so if you’ve got even a vaguely involved setup in GA3 you won’t be able to recreate it in GA4, not yet.

Data itself is fed into GA using the new Data Streams, where you’d have a stream per app, website and so on. Then all the data gets amalgamated into one source of all knowledge and you can filter it on the fly from there.

That sounds like a total mess, Joe. Why the hell would I want to crunch all my data together like that?

Good question. And not just because I typed it out myself.

Before we go any further; if you only want your website data, it’s very easy to view on its own. Same goes for apps. You’d use filters, as described above, but not yet. Google is still wrapping that bit up.

If this had happened in GA3, it would have been a total mess, I have to agree. This is one of the big upgrades to Google Analytics 4 that’s going to transform the way we track user behaviour.

If you were a hardcore GA3 user, you might have known about the User ID report. For the rest of us, this was where you could pass an anonymous user ID into GA every time a user logged in, that let you tie together all their session data even if they swapped devices or cleared their cookies. The only problem was, it was on its own in a separate report so you had to sort of piece together what was happening then try to apply what you learned to your reports in Acquisition, Conversions etc.

The GA4 User ID report doesn’t exist in its own special area; instead this data is going to be used to tie together your user data in the main reports, where it’s at its most useful. As a PPC man doing more and more work in the fashion space all the time, this makes me especially happy because I can start claiming the credit on those users that found a brand through my ad, spent a small amount and made me look like a chump, then got the app and spent another £500 over two years. Suddenly I’m a hero, and you as a brand owner know where your value’s really coming from. For LTV tracking in particular, this will be big.

This is how Google sees it working: User 1 and User 2 are the same person on different devices, so User ID ties everything together.

It needs to be set up, so don’t switch on GA4 and expect miracles but it shouldn’t be rocket science for a smart developer either. I bet there’s a Shopify app or twelve to set this up for GA3 already, and the GA4 ones will soon follow if I’m right.

Obviously this isn’t perfect, because it only tracks logged-in users so you don’t get that info on the 98 users out of 100 who don’t buy anything. Google are working on that too: Google Signals are Google’s way of tracking logged-in Google accounts across devices which adds further info to mix. Really, we’re hoping that the Client ID (stored in the cookie, and what matches sessions to users in GA3) becomes a last-resort fallback way of tracking users but we’ll only get out what we put in by setting it all up properly. So again, don’t turn on GA4 and expect to work instant miracles.

Alright. Is that it then?

Nope, not even close. And there’s going to be more and more I haven’t mentioned here as GA4 gets more and more clever and full-featured. Keep checking back (or get the BFBC weekly mailer) and I’ll do my best to keep you updated.

For now, some quick-fire facts:

  • GA4 measures some stuff automatically, like scrolling. You might want to add to it with your own setup anyway; it’s sometimes a bit basic.
  • Event debugging works across GA4 and Tag Manager, which is really useful if you’re into that. (I am.)
  • Audience-building is like the old method got all the infinity stones; you can specify more conditions and even state orders and time limits between actions taken, and fire an event when a user enters an audience. You’ll struggle to outsmart it.
  • Goals are called conversions now, and for setup you just tick a box in the event report to say “make this event a conversion please”. If you want something specific, you can use the first event to trigger another event with extra requirements and make that the goal. Want a conversion on your thankyou page? Set up a thank_you event to happen when the page_view event fires on a page with “thank-you” in the URL. Then, make thank_you a conversion. Easy peasy.
  • Funnel analysis is way better and you can see changes over time in a clever graph. But we also don’t have the ecommerce funnel from GA3 yet. One step at a time.

I’ve still left out more than I’ve covered here, but hopefully this has sold you on the idea of GA4 and now you’ve decided to set it up and play around with it. There are already tons of guides out there for the more complicated stuff, and remember we’re always around for a chat about data if you fancy it. We certainly will.