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If you do your own Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a tactic to drive website traffic and grow your online visibility, you’ll want to know about a change coming in the tech world. If you have a marketing consultant or team that manages SEO for you, you’ll want to discuss the following news with them.
 
After more than 15 years, Google recently announced it will be retiring its massively popular Universal Analytics platform. The search and data giant began ushering in its new analytics platform (Google Analytics 4, aka GA4) with a beta launch back in 2020 before announcing the plan to cut over to GA4 entirely and completely sunset the widely used Universal Analytics platform earlier this year.
 
This change requires marketers, small businesses, and insurance agencies and brokers like you to make some immediate changes ahead of the official sunset date in 2023. Why you may ask? Well, there are two key reasons:

1. If your company already has Universal Analytics installed, Google will be discontinuing support for the current version on July 1^st, 2023. This means without switching to GA4 all of your website metrics will be lost.
2. If you are not currently tracking website metrics with Universal Analytics, then installing GA4 is the perfect way to get started since you will be tapping into the latest product that will ensure your website data metrics collection is future proof.

In this article we will examine some of the new features of Google Analytics 4 and discuss the necessary next steps you will need to take to prepare for the switch.

“GA4 isn’t so much an update, but an entirely new way of doing analytics – set up to scale for the future, work in a cookieless world, and be a lot more privacy-conscious,” - Krista Seiden (G4 Product Team)
 

So, What’s Changing with Google Analytics 4?

Visual Design & UI Updates

For anyone familiar with Google’s longstanding Universal Analytics platform, a quick look at the new GA4 user interface reveals a stark contrast. Apart from a more modern look and feel with built-in trend, real time, and event tracking graphs, you can tell that Google wanted GA4 to focus on data visualization in a more impactful way than its predecessor.
In the real-time report comparison — shown in the image above – you’ll notice the visualization user interface improvements right away. Static numbers and line graphs have been replaced with geo location maps and inline trend charts to show data insights at a glance. This trend is presented consistently as users navigate through the GA4 platform. Less numbers, more charts are a prevailing theme.
 

Data Measurement & Tracking Changes

The biggest area of trepidation for Universal Analytics power users when news of the GA4 update broke, was the potential for Google changing metrics definitions and nomenclature for the way things have been measured for more than 15 years. Many businesses and marketing organizations have built business intelligence, dashboards, and infrastructure decision making process based on the long-standing data insights Google’s Universal Analytics has provided. The good news here is most key metrics (like sessions, users, page views, and others) are still available in Google Analytics 4. There are also some key data measurements and tracking changes that are a part of GA4.
 
The easiest way to conceptualize the change from UA to GA4 is contrasting Sessions vs. Events. Universal Analytics focused heavily on sessions to determine key performance areas of your website. GA4 has shifted that focus to measuring events — tracking what specific actions users are taking on your website. This is the major philosophical shift between the two platforms. GA4 comes loaded with a set list of automatic events that are tracked natively.
 

Automatic Events

All GA4 reports include these events out of the box. Some of these items previously needed to be configured using Google Tag Manager.
 
Examples:

• First visit (the first time a new user visits your website)
• Session start (the page or channel a user started on your website)
• User engagement (how many pages or actions a user takes on your website)
• Outbound link clicks (any link clicks that take users away from your website)
• File downloads (any PDF, XLS, or other file types downloaded from your website)
• Site search (the number of site searches on your website)
• Video engagement (tracking start and progress of video views)

In our initial use of GA4, the best change noted has been the ability to create custom events in a much easier way than before. If any of the above automatic events do not capture all the measurement criteria for your website or app, you can configure custom events natively in the platform. Here are two great resource videos for configuring custom events and conversions to get the most insights from your website:
Custom Event Tracking
Conversion Tracking in GA4

 

What Changes Do You Need to Make to Prepare for GA4?

There are three key next steps that insurance brokers and agencies will want to take to prepare for the upcoming transition:

• Make the GA4 Transition: After July 1, 2023, you will be able to access your historical data in your Universal Analytics property for at least six months. However new data will not be tracked. In order to have an apples-to-apples year over year comparison of data in GA4 (at the time of sunset next year), you will want to upgrade to GA4 as soon as possible. Here is more information on enabling Google Analytics 4.
• Mark Your Date: Once your transition to GA4 is complete, make sure you make note of the day you enabled traffic in any internal dashboards or documentation, so you have a reference point that denotes the change. This could help in the future when researching any data anomalies.
• Think About Your Tracking Wishlist: As noted above, GA4 makes event tracking easier than before. So, think about any areas of your website you wished you could measure in the past, but did not have the time or resources to activate. Those same measurements can now be more easily tracked inside of Google Analytics 4.

 
About the Author: Kalup Alexander is Digital Marketing Director for The Word & Brown Companies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in New Media Communications and Marketing from Oregon State University. He has been at Word & Brown since 2014.