Information is power, if you want to understand how users interact with your websites, its necessary to use specific tools to understand their behaviour. One of the most used tools is Google universal analytics, in 2021 Google launched a new version under the name of google analytics 4. In this article we will explain the main differences between this new version ‘Google analytics 4’ and the old one ‘Google universal analytic’.
Google universal analytics was first developed with the idea to provide valuable insights into who is visiting the site, and what pages they are viewing. To achieve these factors effectively Universal analytics was focused on the number of visits and pageviews a website had. This provided a general idea of users interests however it was difficult to understand the behaviours of these users.
Google has now shifted their focus to be more on events instead of the number of views. With the new system companies will be able to obtain useful information about their users. The main difference between the two tools is that the way in which GA4 collects and records data is more specific providing benefits including:
▪ Data Streams: GA4 allows to pass data from multiple websites into the same analytics property to build a wider view of your users across multiple digital channels, devices, and platforms.
▪ Predictive analytics: GA4 uses machine-learning algorithms, it is easier to predict future behaviour and so can help to discover more possible users.
▪ Customisable interface: The GA4 system allows to add your own custom report collections to make it easier to navigate and find the specific information that clients are looking for.
▪ Privacy: This tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the quality data.
▪ BigQuery: GA4 comes with a free connection to Big Query so you can run high-speed queries on the raw data.
These are some of the advantages that this new tool ‘GA4’ has over ‘Google universal analytics’. After making a comparative between the two tools, we can see the advantages of using Google Analytics 4 is much clearer than Google Universal analytics.
The Studio 4 is continuously keeping up to date with changes within the digital marketing industry. If you require help with transitioning to Google Analytics 4 contact us today!