All You Need to Know About the Migration to GA4

Your marketing initiatives must include tracking your company’s web performance and enabling you to track how well your techniques and plans are working to increase visitors to your website. Analytics tools will assist you in locating the flaws and shortcomings if you feel your investments need to yield the desired outcomes.

The favourite analytics tool for many businesses for a while was Universal Analytics. Google just declared, however, that it’s time to say farewell to our old friend and switch to Google Analytics 4. It is the new benchmark for tracking traffic and engagement across your websites and apps in one place. Many elements of GA4 are similar to those of UA, although adjusting to a new environment might be difficult. In this article, we are going to see the tricks and hacks to migrate to Google Analytics 4 for an efficient business to take place.

What is G4?

As you might have predicted, Google Analytics 4 is the fourth edition of the software, replacing the asynchronous code and everyone’s dearest, the long-reigning Universal Analytics. It is also Google’s official analytics tool recommendation. In one easy-to-use cross-device report, Google Analytics 4 is made to combine data from websites and mobile apps. Previously, information from these two platforms was collected separately. The new software has numerous benefits, as per Google and some of the benefits of the new friend are mentioned as follows:

     Gathering analytics for apps and websites

     Providing an improved client journey map

     Tracking customization is made simpler by relying on events rather than session-based data

     Banning third-party cookies and data-gathering techniques to improve consumers’ privacy

     Behavioral and conversion modeling services

     More accurate forecasting abilities

     Media platform integration

How to migrate to G4?

Step 1- Launch Your GA4 property

You must create your GA4 property before switching to the new platform. Your prior data analyses from UA to GA4 cannot be transferred. GA4 is a new beginning in every aspect and you must:

To create a new GA4 property, go to your existing UA property and click “Admin.” Then, under property, you’ll see the “GA4 setup assistant” option, Once you click there. A new window will open, click on Get Started (I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property), and next enter on Click and Continue. Success.

Now you can go through the newly generated GA4 Properties. (It may take 24 hours to appear in your Analytics account.)

     Add the tracking code to your website after generating the GA4 attribute.

     To administer and distribute marketing tags, use a Google Tag Manager.

Following installation, verify the new property over the following few days to confirm that you are getting traffic statistics there.

If Google Tag Manager is what you’re using,  a new “GA4 Configuration” tag is to be fired on all pages. Once this has been set up, You will start receiving data into your new GA4 property after this is configured.

Step 2- Complete the Properties Setup.

When switching to Google Analytics 4, you are sadly limited in what you can do. You cannot import and use the tracker components you used in UA here. So now is an excellent opportunity to assess your analytics objectives and identify the most pertinent tracking data. For Google Analytics 4 property, you can build up to 25 additional user properties.

Step 3 –  Customise the metrics and dimensions to be migrated.

It’s essential to know the distinctions between Universal Analytics and GA4 when migrating custom dimensions and metrics. Universal Analytics has four levels of coverage: session, hit, product, and user. However, GA4 allows for the setting of customised dimensions and metrics at both the event and user levels. They should, therefore, either describe your Event or your user.

Step 4- Sync Up All Your Accounts

Start by integrating your Google Ads accounts with GA4 if you’re impressed by GA4’s unique cross-platform data integration and reporting features. Click “linking” in the setup assistant after logging into your Google Ads account. It is as simple as that!

G4 is a comforting hand to the digital world because of its efficiency. But keep in mind that GA4 is basically the same as UA, only stronger! You have improved customizations, more useful tracking features, and more data protection in Google Analytics 4. Therefore, a hearty welcome to GA4!