Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023, which means after this date, it will stop tracking any data. So, if you haven’t migrated to Google Analytics 4, this is the time when you should seriously consider doing it.
With the aim to enlighten publishers and news organizations about Google Analytics 4, it has launched the GA4 Migration Support and Training program. It will comprise a series of webinars to assist publishers in migrating to GA4. It is a multilingual program available in Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Traditional Chinese, and Bahasa Indonesia.
The webinar was hosted by Sarthak Kawade, Enterprise Consultant, Media Monks and Shwetha Elias, Program Manager, Google News Initiative. The Hindi session was initiated by Swetha, who gave a brief overview of the entire webinar and handed it over to Sarthak. He began by quickly describing the agenda of the session that encapsulated the introduction of GA4, a comparison between Universal Analytics and GA4, GA4 terminologies, and pricing.
He then began throwing light on “Building a data-driven publisher business”. Data-driven culture requires a major focus on business objectives. Whenever a reader visits our website, we can collect the data and analyze it. This helps publishers assess how their content is performing. Next are the use cases, which basically represent solutions and can vary from publisher to publisher. The endpoint is business goals. By following the above steps, you can make the publisher data centric.
What challenges were publishers facing? The below illustration will answer this:
Why Google switched to Google Analytics 4?
Sarthak added GA4 works on the event-based data model. However, Universal Analytics was session-based, but it measures website and mobile app sessions separately. Publishers had to assess both individually and club them in the backend, but this issue has been resolved in Google Analytics 4. The cross-platform analysis allows publishers to track the customer journey and how they interact with your content across different devices.
With Google Analytics 4, publishers can do so much more that wasn’t possible earlier. One of the most powerful features is predictive analysis. Machine Learning allows analytics data meaningful, accessible, and actionable for all businesses. You can use this feature to determine which users are more likely to convert.
Also, in GA4, you can create various types of reports which can help you assess how to provide a good user experience. There are various sections of these reports, such as funnels, exploration, etc. It offers deeper integration because GA4 acts as a connecting tissue between multiple sources such as the web, marketing, app, and even CRM.
The speaker then elaborated on the comparison between GA4 and Universal Analytics and their data model comparison, basic terminology, different types of events, automatically collected events, and metrics, and concluded the session with pricing. It was a very insightful session, and four sessions are also scheduled under APAC GA4 Migration Support and Training Program.
