Universal Analytics is obsolete as of July 1, 2023 and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is taking its place
GA4 is Google’s next-generation measurement protocol and data model that gives you a more accurate picture of how users interact with your app or website. Universal Analytics (UA) is GA’s current measuring protocol and GA4 builds on UA’s successes (while being quite a bit better).
Unified data model
One key difference between GA4 and Universal Analytics is that GA4 uses a unified data model. The unified data model gives you a single customer view by stitching together all the interactions a user has with your business across devices and channels. This gives you a more accurate picture of how customers interact with your business, so you can make better decisions about your marketing and product strategies, for help making a marketing audit, click here or contact us and we’ll run you through the basics.
Built with privacy in mind
GA4 was built post-GDPR for a digital media landscape with much higher privacy standards. One of the ways Google complies with privacy regulations is by using pseudonymous identifiers instead of cookies or IP addresses. GA4 also uses differential privacy, a technique that adds statistical noise to data to protect the privacy of individual users while still allowing for aggregate analysis. Basically, GA4 will give you more insight into customer behaviour without compromising their privacy.
Machine learning
Another key difference is that GA4 uses machine learning to automatically surface insights and provides more granular control over data collection. GA4 also makes it easier to collect data from apps and websites built on different technologies, so you can get a complete picture of your customer’s journey, which will help unravel the importance of a marketing agency and their personalised strategy for you.
If you’re still using Universal Analytics, now is the time to switch to GA4, the future of Google Analytics. If you’re not sure where to start? Google’s GA4 Migration Guide can help you make the switch.
Still stuck? Reach out for a migration and custom event set-up.
