Every business needs insightful data to analyze its marketing and business performances, as well as to make faster and smarter decisions based on that. Businesses need to invest in different analytics tools to get data-driven insights that will give them a complete picture of how they are performing. There are many free and paid analytics tools available; one such tool is Google Analytics (GA4, new version) which is free and presents a vast amount of insightful data that can help all kinds of businesses (Small to Medium to large companies) in terms of getting quality information about their users, their behaviors across the website, their demographics, and most importantly in crafting their marketing and business strategy.
GA4 is the newest version that Google launched last year in 2023 and is different from universal analytics. GA4 tracks data based on event-model and uses AI to detect event-level data while UA-tracked data were based on a session-based model. There are other differences too that I will cover in a separate post. Now let’s focus on how GA4 can assist businesses to carve out quality metrics and insights to become better at decision-making and define a strategy that can boost their growth.
Types of Reports Available
Audience Report
This report tells you about your real users, who they are, what they do, and their demographics. The demographic data includes:
- Country
- Region
- City
- Language
- Age
- Gender
- Interest
Acquisition Report
This report details about how users are actually finding your website and which all channels direct them to your website pages. It basically reports about marketing channels’ performance. It helps you know which channel contributes better results in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversions.
You can get more insight by looking at source/medium reports that give additional information about a particular channel. UTM parameter & landing page details are also reported under acquisition.
Sales Report
This report is mostly useful for e-commerce businesses and details about the number of sales/purchases happened as setup. For this, you need to work with a developer to setup e-commerce tracking with key product details, such as product info, price, currency, and transaction ID.
E-commerce Report
This is for e-commerce businesses and reports about e-commerce purchases, purchase journeys, checkout journeys, promotions, and transactions.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) basically reports about site health issues and how the website is performing on Google search. GA4 lets users to connect their GSC accounts; see and analyze the organic search report into analytics with better metrics.
Cohort Report
It lets you create users groups based on different criteria, such as acquisition date or first transaction date and study the behavior of these groups who share common characteristics.
Events Report
You can check all the event details here in this report along with quality metrics. You see here both by-default and custom setup events (need to set up if not).
Conversion Report
See all the conversions here in this report. FYI, events are marked as conversions, GA4 lets you to choose which event you wish to see as conversions, both automated and custom events. To report any custom conversion, you need to first set up custom events and then mark those events as conversions.
Different Tools Integration
Running any AdWords campaigns? Connect your Google AdWords account with GA4 and see the report here in Google Analytics. The same applies to other Google services accounts’ integration, connect with them and get all the reports in one place.
Some Important Insights that GA4 offers:
Event-based Data Collection
In universal analytics (UA), whatever you wanted to track, needed to set up events manually or through GTM. But, GA4 operates on the event-based model, which means every activity is tracked as an event in GA4. The best part is many of the basic events, such as clicks, scrolls, video plays, page visits, purchases are automatically tracked so you don’t have to setup them up manually, only you need to enable enhanced conversion options for some. Other than this, you need to setup custom events based on your requirements.
Unified Reporting (Web + App)
GA4 provides unified reporting which means data from the web and app are both tracked in a single property. It gives you a centralized view on your users’ data and lets you analyze which device contributing more to your business success or whether both devices working together in your business growth.
Better Audience Segmentation
You have the option to segment your users’ data in many different ways; can be used for user analysis, market analysis, creating marketing/business strategy, marketing purposes and retargeting campaigns. You can segment your audiences based on region, cohort, interests, channels, dimensions, metrics, events, conversions and other metrics.
Attribution Modelling
Attribution modeling is an important report that GA4 provides. It actually tells you how different channels, devices and campaigns are working together to generate traffic, conversion and business. It helps you avoid making bad decisions and gives you a better picture of your marketing channels and campaign performances.
For e.g. if you are running marketing campaigns across different channels and you notice that only a couple of channels contribute to quality traffic and leads, you may think to pause other campaigns considering this data but that’s not the case. When you look at attribution modeling data you may see that some channels not directly contributing but assisting other channels to generate conversions or business. So looking at this report gives you a clearer picture to decide on marketing channels spend where to invest more or less depending on direct and assisting conversions.
Customized Reporting
GA4 offers many reporting templates that let you design the reports the way you want. Types of reports you can create depend on your business/marketing goals but still there are few you may think of:
- Audience level report
- Channels overview report
- Funnel & Path analysis
- Event Campaigns report
- Google Ads campaigns report
- Social media marketing report
- Landing pages report
Funnel/Path Analysis
Analyze your users’ behavior by looking at funnel and path analysis reports. You have the option to customize the steps in the funnel so you can look at the data in many ways and from different perspectives.
Cross-Device Insights
As GA4 provides unified reporting you can do the cross-device analysis by looking at the different metrics and dimensions.
Predictive Analytics
There is an option named “insights” in the top right corner of the GA4 dashboard and every report. That provides you a list of questions or you can search your query as well in the search box to get your answer by GA4 AI.
