Many businesses are reliant on the hugely popular GA3 (known as Universal Analytics) when it comes to analysing the success of their marketing efforts and monitoring how customers use and engage with their websites. And if you currently use Google Analytics on your site, it’s likely that your version is Universal Analytics.


What is Google Analytics?

For those who aren’t sure, Google Analytics (GA) is a free traffic analytics tool from Google.
You can use it to do things like:

track how many people visit your site
see how visitors reached your site (traffic sources)
see how visitors navigate and interact with your site
track goal conversions (such as enquiry form submissions, brochure downloads, product purchases)

It also provides you with additional information about your website visitors, such as their location, age, gender and device type.

As a platform, GA is not only free, but incredibly comprehensive and relatively easy for newcomers to get to grips with. This has led to Google taking a huge share of the market, with an estimated 30 million websites relying on GA for their analytics.

Do I need to switch from GA3 to GA4?

From 1st July 2023, the ‘old’ version of Google Analytics (GA3/Universal Analytics) will stop collecting data. This means that if you’re running Universal Analytics on your website and you don’t install GA4, your analytics will effectively stop on that date.

If you aren’t running GA on your site at all and you want to start, you can go ahead and set up GA4 as a brand-new user.

If you’re already running Universal Analytics and you want to continue using GA, you need to ‘switch’ to GA4 using the prompts on your dashboard.

I’ll guide you through both of these processes in this article. At the end, we’ll also look at some Google Analytics alternatives, for those who are interested in other options.
What are the differences between Universal Analytics and the new GA4?

The main difference is in how GA tracks your website visitors and assesses their engagement.

Universal Analytics was all about session-based tracking. You may be familiar with the terms ‘hits’ and ‘page views’ from Universal Analytics. In other words, we were encouraged to look at how many user interactions (hits) took place over a given timeframe (a session), including page views and conversions (such as purchasing a product or completing a form).

But in GA4, it’s all about ‘events’. Every interaction is captured as an event, so all the ‘hit’ types from Universal Analytics become ‘events’ in GA4, including clicks, file downloads, page views, scrolls and video views.

This shift in focus gives us more granular data and makes it easier to understand how customers are interacting with our websites and apps, even across multiple devices or multiple sites.

Setting up GA4 in 8 steps

I’ve identified


To read the full article, you’ll need to have a physical copy of the magazine which you can sign up for here for 6 issues delivered to your door from just £16!

https://store.promobile.online/products/pro-mobile-magazine-6-issue-1-year-subscription

You’ll also get full interactive access to this and the last year of magazines via the Pro Mobile Magazine App which is available from both the Apple App Store and Android PlayStore