Insights
Published: 8.24.23
In 2022, Google announced it would be sunsetting Universal Analytics (UA) in favor of its newer tool, Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The official transition occurred on July 1, 2023, which is when UA began to stop processing information. Despite the phased approach Google is taking to sunsetting UA, we are no longer utilizing UA at Br8kthru, because by July 1, 2024, Universal Analytics will cease to exist as we know it. (Make sure to export that data so you can continue to access it over time.)
Despite the fact that this transition has been coming for a while, and that we began transferring data and undergoing GA4 implementation for our Clients last year, we continue to learn new things as we adjust to GA4. With over a month since the formal transition occurred, we wanted to share some of our summary and analysis of the new platform.
A Quick Dive on GA4 vs. Universal Analytics: What’s Changed
GA4 is the next generation of Google’s tracking and analytics platform. Given the importance of analytics in defining business strategy and making decisions, understanding the differences between the two systems is pivotal to long-term success. Below is a chart explaining some of the key differences in GA4 vs. Universal Analytics. Notably, much of the data overlaps, though is slightly different.
Did You See That? What We’ve Noticed
GA4 has been around for a while, and at Br8kthru, we’ve been working on GA4 implementation and use for over a year now. That isn’t to say we’re experts, but we’ve been noticing and addressing a variety of differences, challenges, bugs, and inconsistencies in the new platform. Here are a few of the things we’ve learned beyond the implementation stage, as we’ve worked more in GA4 in our day-to-day work.
Ample Customization Opportunities
One of the benefits of GA4 implementation has been the customization — businesses can extensively customize their GA4 setup to align best with business needs. Not only does GA4 offer ample customization out of the box, but we have been collaborating with our Clients and developers to offer more customization for complex customer journeys.
We’ve also been working with Clients to ensure what is being measured aligns with their business goals. Our Clients, especially those in eCommerce, have been able to add more nuance to their data and reporting, thanks to these customization opportunities.
A New User Interface
For many people, the transition between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 and overall GA4 implementation have been challenging because of the differences in user interface. Having relied on UA for so long, many people are finding the adjustment to be cumbersome.
Beyond that, many reports are unclear on how they are scoped, or what they are measuring. For example, a report may be scoped by sessions or users, but that may not be clear until a user has dug into the data more. In addition, the same information may be available in multiple reports, but seemingly similar reports may display different data, making them difficult to use for reporting purposes.
Comparison of Data
GA4 uses different metrics than UA did, making one-to-one comparisons of the data difficult, if not impossible. However, for the purpose of decision-making, many Clients want access to previous data, including data that is inherently a comparison, like month-over-month (MoM) or year-over-year (YoY) data.
At Br8kthru, we’ve been collaborating with Clients to understand and filter the data they truly need for decision-making and reduce the “noise” of less relevant data. More than that, we’ve been working to help Clients understand their past data and use that to set realistic goals for the future.
According to Nick Meyer, our Technical Search Marketing Manager "What’s more important than comparing current results to the past is what we’re doing now or next. Instead of comparing apples to oranges with UA and GA4 data, we’re building a plan and forecasting what the future could look like instead of isolating one month in the past".
Changes to Privacy with Thresholding
As Google continues to adjust to changing privacy laws and expectations, it has implemented data thresholding in GA4. Essentially, data thresholding prevents personal data from users from being easily identifiable by anonymizing it. For customers and individuals, this change protects their data and privacy significantly. For businesses, the data threshold cannot be adjusted, so data may not be available if it fails to meet the threshold.
Bugs + Inconsistencies
Data Discrepancies
Some of the bigger inconsistencies we’ve noticed as we’ve done more GA4 implementation are discrepancies in the data we’re seeing. Across reports and between tools, we’ve noticed metrics are not reporting the same results. Some of this could be due to discrepancies in tools, and challenges in the data layer.
The data layer allows websites and tools to pass more reliable and flexible data + information to GA4, but many website platforms use terminology that cannot be parsed by GA4. For example, GA4 may use the term “add to cart” for an event, while another site may use “add to order.” Because the two don’t align, the event may not be able to be reported. The result is users of platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, and BigCommerce are needing to change the code on their website for accurate measurement in GA4.
Because of this bug, we’re recommending Clients lean on their internal tools and other sources of data to help fact check GA4. Tools like customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) softwares that are collecting internal data are able to provide a secondary source of information to help realign metrics within GA4 and understand attribution differently.
Data Lag
Data is being populated by GA4, but it is not complete and available for approximately 4 to 12 days. Google itself reports the data lag is approximately 24–48 hours, however, in conversations with Google representatives and in our own experience, we’ve noticed it to be more in line with 7 days. This lag impacts all real-time activities, which can no longer be done in real time, which impacts business decisions. For example, paid search results can no longer be adjusted daily in response to performance.
So What + What’s Next
As a relatively new platform, Google Analytics 4 is changing rapidly. Though GA4 was officially launched in 2020 and many people began GA4 implementation last year, the platform is still very new, especially when compared to Universal Analytics, which had been around since 2012 to work out all its issues. The result is the platform is still changing and growing. Bugs and inconsistencies, like the ones we’ve noticed, are still being addressed.
Overall, we’re excited about the transition from UA to GA4. Universal Analytics was not equipped to measure much of how we do business today; the platform was built for a web-first world, and had become older, dated. The reports and metrics it used were reflective of that. On the other hand, GA4 was built for our current mobile-first world. With GA4, we’re able to bring all our reporting into the present. Despite current bugs here and there, GA4 is going to be a benefit for the entire industry, especially as it continues to evolve.