5 Ways How GA4 Impacts Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Google Analytics 4 is Google’s latest flagship analytics product. If you are new to it or have been dreading migrating to GA4 from this July, here are some breathers how it will help your marketing efforts!

Google Analytics 4 changes how marketers and agencies collect and measure customer data and manage reports. This latest update will work without third-party cookies and not store IP addresses, complying with GDPR and other privacy laws. It will also improve knowing the customer’s likely behaviour through its newly introduced predictive metrics. 

Let’s closely examine the key areas in GA4 that will significantly upgrade your digital marketing strategy. 

Active Engagement on Pages

GA3 or UA did not include the three metrics – Engagement, Monetization, and Retention.

The Engagement metric seems to be the most crucial from SEO and user experience/behaviour perspectives. It gives a miscrospoic view of the engagement, events, conversions, and more. 

So, when you go to the Engagement overview tab, you will see two important measurements – Average engagement time and Engaged sessions per user. 

The Average engagement time should not be confused with the Average Time on Page metric as on Universal Analytics (GA3). 

Google defines Avg. Engagement Time: “Average engagement time per active user for the time period selected. 

Average engagement time = total user engagement durations / number of active users”

On the other hand, the average time on page is “the average amount of time users spent viewing a specified page or screen, or set of pages or screens.”

While they both calculate the time on page and they both measure the difference between the time when the user moved from page A to page B, GA4 includes the calculation of the one active. UA did not consider that.

What this means is the user is actively on the page on the foreground. That page was on the user’s focus. In UA, the average time on the page metric would be longer because it does not count the exit from one page to another. GA4 results on average engagement time would be much less. 

You could say that the engagement metric is the replacement but not the opposite of the scary UA metric, bounce rate.  And, bounce rate is not there by default on GA4 now. What’s better is that the engagement metric is more advanced than bounce rate which does not give a clear picture of what the user interest is. 

This begs the question, “What can engagement metric do for SEO in digital marketing?”

It will mostly be on the technical SEO side of things where you can improve page loading speed. A lesser engagement could also indicate if your traffic comes mostly from Google Ads, so that can be expected.  

Based on these, you can focus on specific SEO and content distribution strategies to improve engagement. 

Granular Audience Targeting

No digital marketing strategy can work without knowing the audience. 

Visit the User attributes section under Reports, and click on the overview. You will be able to the users based on country, town or city, gender, demographics, and interests, among others.

You could further filter data by going to the demographics section and adding dimensions such as your blogs, the platforms and devices the user uses to visit your site. 

At this granular level, you can know how your audience interacts with your website. 

It is also important to remember that GA4 takes data from both mobile and web into a single property. UA would show different data for each mobile and web based visits. 

Now, when it comes to reporting, you can trace the entire customer journey from multiple devices, sources, and other filters. On a strategic level, you know which type of content or ad is working through the touchpoints.

Better Sales Potential with Predictive Metrics

From machine learning and Big Data technologies comes the predictive metrics in GA4. This kind of predictive modelling expands on the concept that if an audience engaged with a product on your eCommerce site, you are likely going to re-target it later with similar products. 

Google Analytics 4 has three predictive analytics metrics that you can find in Audience builder inside Explorations tab. 

Purchase Probability

It is likely that that last-28-day-active-user will log a specific conversion event in the next week.

Churn Probability

If the user was active on the app in the last seven days, they may not be active in the next seven days. 

Predictive Revenue

The revenue to expect from every purchase conversion in the next 28 days who was active in the last 28 days. 

Source: Google

This type of predictive analysis provides a better way to target customers who are more likely to purchase, and hence, increase returns and reduce abandoned carts. 

And those who feel that this is not going to give an exact picture or will take time to develop, here’s one thing. This predictive modelling is free of cost, as GA4 is completely free. Identifying the purchase or churn probabilities or the predictive revenue will certainly help in driving sales, even for a small business without much funds. 

If you are still not convinced, McDonald’s in Hong Kong used the predictive audience of “likely seven-day purchasers” and used it on its Google Ads. It saw 2.3 times stronger ROI, according to Google. 

Improved Customer Trust through Data Privacy Adoption

According to the IAPP survey across 19 countries, “68% of consumers globally are either somewhat or very concerned about their privacy online.”

Now we discussed that Google is leveraging machine learning capabilities in predicting insightful future user behaviours. It is integrating AI for other purposes too. One is to comply with data privacy. 

Some of the new in-built privacy features in GA4 are mentioned below. 

• IP Masking, which was an opt-in for marketers in UA, is fully integrated. 
• Data storage duration in GA4 is by default set to 2 months up to 14 months. This complies with GDPR’s principle of storage limitation.
• Consent Mode allows users to deny cookies when visiting landing pages from PPC ads or just visiting the site. If the user does not allow consent, it will not store cookies. Instead it will send pings to GA4. 

Detailed Visualisations With Funnel Explorations

So you want to look at all the predefined touchpoints and understand why users on your site are leaving before purchase?

You can think of setting up a goal or a macro conversion, let’s say, a product purchase on your eCommerce site. But think of this also. The marketing efforts you have put on creating content through SEO, blogs, or PPC ads, may not have been directly responsible to not lead to a purchase. 

This is where as a marketer, you need to look at the micro conversion, which can be as simple as signing up a newsletter. So where the gap is is what you should be knowing. 

Here you can use funnel explorations. 

Under the Explore tab you will find Funnel. You can start with a closed funnel or make it open. 

Then you could do segment comparisons, as on the screenshot below. 

You can further add parameters and choose the steps from between first open visit to purchase. 

Now the funnel also shows how the users are visiting your pages. Once done, you could create fully customised report on the microconversions and see at which specific stage the audience is going away. 

The funnel reports can be extremely detailed and are fully customisable. It takes into account all the events or any event you choose. The predecessor only could show pageviews and it was not customer-centric as it has become now. 

You can further read Customizing GA4 reports in detail. 

Ready For the Next Big Leap in Marketing Analytics?

GA4 is a comprehensive analytics toolset that will improve your customers’ experience in many ways. While it has a steep learning curve, it’s adoption is inevitable. Hopefully, these above mentioned areas have helped you know what insights you can collect to improve your digital marketing plan. 

Check out the top Google Analytics courses to learn from the best!

Further Reads