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GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4 VS UNIVERSAL ANALYTICS

Those of us who love Universal Analytics will be sad to see a few features go…or change. Here are a few metrics that we will be either waving goodbye to or seeing differently. Watch out for the latter when comparing data in your reports, as they aren’t truly comparable to UA:

• Bounce rate: this will be going completely. Whilst it used to be a useful metric, it became fairly unreliable as someone could have ‘bounced’ off your page because they found the information they need (e.g. a phone number to call), rather than because they simply weren’t interested in the page content.
• Users: be careful when reporting on users in GA4, as it is calculated differently. UA focused on total users (named ‘Users’), whereas GA4’s ‘Users’ are actually active users. 
• Pageviews: now known as ‘Views’ in GA4, these include screen views as well as page views (i.e. app screens).
• Sessions: known as ‘Session Start’ in GA4. A session in UA is currently ended at midnight and a new session will begin (in the time zone that the view is set up in). This also happens if a user picks up new campaign parameters i.e. with a UTM. These types of sessions will no longer be reset in GA4, so you may see a drop in sessions going forward. 
• Conversion goals: these will be known as ‘Conversion Events’ in GA4. They will be close to your UA goals (if you’ve set up equivalents), but GA4 will count each instance of a conversion event during a session, rather than only once. 

With the above said, GA4 has so much to offer and there are still a lot of important UA features that remain in place or have been improved. Once you’ve delved into it and got used to a different way of reporting, you will begin to love the new and improved analytics. 

Here are some intelligent and exciting features that GA4 has to offer:

• Unified user tracking: enabling you to cross-track single user journeys through cross-device and cross-platform tracking.
• Audience grouping: using the cross-tracking information, you will be able to create more precisely targeted audience groupings that can be used in your Google Ads PPC campaigns.
• AI learning: incorporating Google’s AI, GA4 can fill in gaps where data may be incomplete.
• Events and goals: event tracking setup has been simplified in GA4 and there are now ‘Conversion Events’ already in place (you can still set up more customised goals to match your KPIs too).
• Engagement rate: not a direct replacement for bounce rate, engagement rate is shown by the percentage of ‘Engaged Sessions’ that either lasted longer than 10 seconds, had 2 or more ‘Views’ or produced a ‘Conversion Event’. 
• ‘Explorations’: this new hub features template charts that you can customise to get quick in-depth insights e.g. funnel exploration, user exploration, user lifetime and more.