Google Analytics is a tool that helps business owners like you understand how potential customers are using their websites. It tells you how many people visit your site, which pages they look at, how long they spend browsing, and so much more. People use this information to improve their sites and to make informed choices for their digital marketing.
On the 1st of July, the previous versions of Google Analytics are being discontinued, and every website must start using Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and if you don’t switch before the 30th of June, you could risk losing valuable data.
But wait, first things first… what’s the difference with GA4?
GA4 has some great new features. Here are a few of our favourites:
- More detailed information
GA4 gives you more power to track specific actions—like button clicks, purchases or form submissions. This means you can get a more detailed view of how people are interacting with your site. - Gain a better understanding of your customers
GA4 can provide you with a range of information to help you better understand your customers, including age, location, and even their interests. This info allows you to adapt your site to meet your customers’ needs better. - Track users across devices
In today’s world, people use multiple devices to access the internet. GA4 allows you to track visitors as they move between devices, such as their phones to their desktop computers. This provides a complete view of how visitors are using your site or app. - Save time analysing
GA4 uses machine learning to find patterns and trends in the data it collects for you, saving you loads of time. It’s really helpful for improving your website because you can see what’s working and what’s not and make the right changes.
OK…so what now? Automatic Migration vs Manual Migration
Thankfully, Google will automatically switch over any account that doesn’t manually switch over. So for many website owners, this will be fine. If you didn’t know you had Google Analytics, never looked at it, and don’t invest in digital advertising, you can probably leave it to Google’s scripts to take care of this for you.
However, if your website is an important lead generator for your business, we recommend migrating manually before the cut-off. Making the move manually is far better than leaving it to Google because you can:
- Make sure your data is correct.
Using Google’s automatic migration is an automatic process. It will try its best to move everything across, but it cannot make human decisions at each step or apply customisations applicable to your setup. This could result in you losing lots of valuable data. - Set up the new features.
If you know about Goals in the current version of GA, you’ll know these are very important in measuring the effectiveness of your website and digital advertising. In GA4, these are being replaced by conversions, and we’ll want to ensure conversions that correspond to your current Goals are all set up properly and recording conversion events successfully.