New Google Analytics 4 Update

With business increasingly moving online and budgets getting tighter, companies are under more pressure than ever to get the most out of their marketing spend. Understanding your customer preferences is critical to staying competitive.

Millions of companies rely on Google Analytics for actionable insights about their customers’ behavior online—and Google recently announced some big changes with their new Google Analytics 4 update.

The update is a major overhaul of their web analytics platform, and it has some exciting improvements.

Here’s what the new Google Analytics 4 update means for your business.

What’s in the new update

It has machine learning at its core

The new platform incorporates Google’s powerful machine learning engines to automatically source helpful insights and give you a more complete picture of your customers across devices and platforms.

It’s customer-centric, not device-centric

The old Google Analytics provided insights into customer behavior based on the platform or device they were using. It was fragmented—for example, web analytics was separate from app analytics.

The Google Analytics 4 update gives you customer-centric measurement, providing a complete picture of how customers behave across devices and platforms so you can make better decisions.

For example, you can see if customers first discover your business from an ad on the web, then later install your app and make purchases there.

It’s privacy centric

We live at a time when both consumers and governments are becoming more privacy conscious.

Major legislations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed in the EU have already had a big impact on how businesses can collect and use consumer data, forcing companies to adapt.

Google Analytics 4 update complies with the latest privacy standards while positioning itself to remain accurate even as industry standards and regulations continue to change.

For example, the new update is built to work even without cookies. Google has adapted by replacing cookies with other identifiers—such as signals from users who have opted in to receive personalized ads—and then using modeling to fill in the gaps.

What it means for you

Better, faster customer insights

The machine learning at the heart of the Google Analytics 4 update means you can have a deeper understanding of your customers faster than ever before. Here are a few examples:

Automatic alerts

By applying Google’s advanced machine learning models, you can now receive automatic alerts to significant trends in your data—for example, a product experiencing rising demand.

Predictive metrics

Google is also continuing to add predictive metrics. For example, it can show you the potential revenue you could earn from a particular group of customers. This might allow you to better target your ads, or it could trigger an analysis on why certain customers are likely to spend more than others.

Simplified and reorganized reporting

Google Analytics 4 simplifies reporting so you can intuitively find marketing insights based on the part of the customer journey you’re interested in.

For example, you can see what channels are driving new customers in the user acquisition report, then use the engagement and retention reports to understand the actions these customers take, and whether they stick around after converting.

More control of your data

In keeping with the move to a more privacy-centric platform, Google Analytics 4 gives you much more control over how data in your property is collected, stored, and used. Here are some things you can do:

Control data settings in your account

You can anonymize IP addresses for your web property, disable some or all data collection, and specify a data retention period, among other things.

Choose whether your data is used for ads personalization

You can control ads personalization for your entire Google Analytics property, or just by certain parameters, such as geography, event type, user property, or session.

Remove data

You can request data to be deleted from Google Analytics servers. You can also delete data for individual users or a property.

The bottom line

Google Analytics 4 update is an exciting upgrade to an already indispensable platform for marketers. Make sure you take advantage of these powerful new features to better understand your customers and grow your business.