GA4 The Basics: answers to all the questions you were too shy to ask!

We sat down with Rob Stalham, our Web Analytics Manager to find out more about GA4 and what it means for businesses. We wanted to ask him the basic questions we’ve all been wondering about, so you don’t have to! We hope this is useful.

1. When is Google going to retire Universal Analytics (UA) and GA360?

The standard Universal Analytics will stop collecting data in July 2023 and will stop storing data in October 2023. If you have GA360 there is a little more time to prepare as data will stop being collected in July 2024 and data storage will cease in October 2024.

What are the key differences between the current Universal Analytics and GA4?

• UA has always been thought of as a reporting tool whereas GA4 is more focussed on deeper audience analysis. The huge variety of reports previously available in the UA interface has now been replaced with a select few in GA4, with the emphasis on each business creating and customising their own reports for the data that they are interested in.
• UA has various ‘hit types’ to classify activity where as GA4 is solely ‘event’ based where every interaction is an event. This is important because now interactions across different touchpoints can be compared on a like for like basis, meaning that you no longer have to worry whether certain hit types are compatible for comparison.
• GA4 is Privacy Centric and with integration with Google Consent Mode is able to track anonymised pings to Google servers to help with the modelling of conversion data within platforms such as Google Ads.
• GA4 is able to track website and app activity in a single property, bringing together more user data and creating greater insights.
• GA4 is a much more customisable platform with only a few standard reports. You must decide what you will find useful and build your own suite of reports to give you the information you require.

3. Is GA4 a paid for tool?

No, the standard GA4 is free, but you can upgrade to GA4360 which has additional features such as sub-properties and roll-up properties, as well as ‘realtime’ data and longer data store time.

4. How do you migrate to GA4?

You can use the set up assistant within the current Google Analytics and follow these simple sets to prepare, and find out more in our blog.

• Audit your existing UA set up and decide what is useful and what is not to decide what you need to move across to GA4.
• Plan your implementation by reviewing what events GA4 will automatically collect and what recommended events you can implement on your site to understand what needs to be recreated in GA4.
• Implement your tracking changes. There are 25 custom parameters available for each Event as well as automatically collected parameters, but decide what you truly need.
• Plan team training as GA4 is quite different from UA!

5. Will I have to relink my site?

You will not need to add any new scripts to your site if you already have Google Tag Manager or Google Tag set up for your current UA.

6. How far in advance do you need to migrate to GA4?

Migration strategies should be in place by end of January 2023 at the latest. However the sooner the better in order to give yourself time to understand GA4 and the reporting differences to UA. Your data will look different and you need to give yourself time to understand these differences so you can explain them to your business.

7. How do you build a report in GA4?

You can use templates provided in the explore section of GA4. Reporting set up techniques will vary depending on what you’d like to achieve. If you are in need of help, we would love to hear from you so get in touch.

8. GA4 looks more complicated than UA in terms of needing to build reports. How do you get your GA4 set up to be as close to UA’s functionality as possible?

You should rethink how you report on your data in GA4, and only rebuild what is necessary. GA4 is a tool to interrogate your data but as it only stores data for 14 months you might want to consider adding a data warehouse such as Big Query and then building your reports in something such as Looker Studio (previously Data Studio).

9. In what way will my new GA4 reports differ from UA reporting?

The data model in GA4 has changed, so it’s likely that there will be differences between the reports created by the two tools. Some metrics have changed such as bounce rate, others have been removed such as unique page views and some metrics have been added such as engaged sessions. If you can get your GA4 account set up as soon as possible you’ll be able to spend time interrogating these differences and understanding them for your business.

10. Are UA and GA4 reports directly comparable i.e. will I be able to compare a GA4 report to an existing UA report to look at year on year trends?

Trends will be similar as there are some metrics that are roughly comparable such as ‘pageview’ vs ‘views’, although there are likely to be differences in results due to the difference in the data collection models.

11. Will I lose all my current and old UA data?

Yes. The deadline for backing up your UA data is October 2023 for standard Google analytics. There are ways to retain your UA data, which we can advise on.

12. I’ve heard GA4 only stores data for 14 months – is this right and what can I do about it?

Yes that is correct. If you have paid for GA4360 you can retain up to 50 months of data, but the standard GA4 accounts will only store 14 months’ worth of data. However, GA4 accounts also have access to ‘Big Query’ which is Google’s data warehousing tool and we would recommend using this tool or something similar to store data for longer than 14 months.

13. Will GA4 continue to develop after switchover?

Yes, the tool will continue to evolve. Keep an eye on the Google updates found here.