One of the many hats we have to wear when we are SEO Consultants is that we also have to be pretty well experienced in Google Analytics. A short while back, Google shocked the Digital Marketing world and announced that they are doing away with what we know of Google Analytics in an effort to get more people using GA4.
In this blog post, I’ll dig into what this means for everyone and what to do about this. Understandably, a lot of the SEO community is not too happy with this decision.
Why does Google Analytics matter?
For starters, we learn a lot from Google Analytics, including how people find our website, what they do when they visit our site, how long they stay on our site, and what pages they view. Additionally, we can use Google Analytics to track conversions, which helps us determine how well our website is performing in terms of achieving our business goals. Overall, Google Analytics provides valuable insights that can help us improve our website and better serve our visitors.
What is the difference between what is currently in Google Analytics vs. GA4
Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool on the market. GA4 is its newest version, which was released in October 2020. Both versions allow you to track your website traffic and analyze your audience behavior. However, there are some key differences between the two platforms.
GA4 offers a more intuitive interface and easier-to-understand reporting. It also provides more advanced features, such as data visualizations and custom dimensions. GA4 also gives you the ability to create remarketing audiences, which can be used to target ads to specific groups of users.
Overall, GA4 is a more powerful and sophisticated looking tool than Google Analytics.
My overall impression personally is that the level of granularity is lost in GA4. The current version of Google Analytics is brilliant because if you ask a random question about the users of your website, you can probably get the answer.
GA4 has more of a “this is probably what the people want” vibe. Which may be enough for 90% of marketers.
So what can we do to get our data back?
Obviously, GA4 will be necessary to some degree. It’ll replace the current Google Analytics implementation and will still provide some basic information.
To get advanced level tracking, you may want to consider some Google Analytics alternatives. Here are a handful of options, but please research and test to see what the best option for you is.
1. KISSmetrics
2. Mixpanel
3. Woopra
4. Clicky
5. StatCounter
6. Gauges
7. Reinvigorate
8. GoSquared
9. Piwik
10. HeatMap API
All in all, this migration is unavoidable. It’s best to adapt as fast as possible and learn as much as you can over time to get the most out of your website data as possible.
