By Ed Pierce, FMW Brand Acceleration
March 6, 2023
Google’s Universal Analytics will be replaced by Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on July 1, 2023. As a result, fleet marketing professionals should familiarize themselves with the new platform as soon as possible.
As covered in a previous Call to Action column, Google Analytics 4 was announced in October 2020 to address the growing number of data sources and new platforms generated by mobile apps and IoT devices. This platform can be used to run cross-platform analytics for organizations. GA4 can track any device and give a comprehensive view of a visitor’s engagement.
GA4’s enhanced ability to view user data across all devices gives it a richer data set to build machine-learning models. These models allow marketers to predict the actions of their customers.
New Modeling Alternatives
GA4 offers three new built-in modeling capabilities that make it possible to use the company’s marketing team’s resources to provide essential predictive analytics:
- Purchase probability helps predict the likelihood that users visiting your website or app in the past 28 days will purchase in the next 7 days.
- Churn probability predicts how likely it is that recently active users will not visit your website or app in the next seven days.
- Revenue prediction predicts the revenue expected from all purchase conversions within the past 28 days from an active user in the previous 28 days.
With those models available right on the user interface, a company can work on more complex models and solve more advanced problems.
Smarter Insights to Improve Decision-making and ROI
Google Analytics 4’s key distinguishing features are user-centric reporting, built-in modeling, and powerful tools marketers can use to understand customers’ journeys.
While advanced models may still require data team support, GA4 makes data extraction easier. Combining your GA4 data with other sources, such as your order history, customer relationship management system, or other sources, is now easier. Your team can then create more detailed models to understand customers’ behavior.
Marketers can use predictive analytics to differentiate actions among prospects and customers to increase sales and retention while reducing costs. For example, customers can be ranked by their likelihood of buying. Sales teams can benefit from both rankings as they gain insight into each buyer’s journey.
Sales teams can use these ranking insights to adjust their strategies to maximize sales. This also allows marketers to project sales pipelines with greater accuracy.
B2B Website Metrics
There are several critical differences between UA4 and GA4. First, UA depended on session tracking, while GA4 uses event-based tracking.
Engagement is one of the essential B2B metrics you can track, and it is how your website meets user needs and keeps users coming back quarter after quarter.
Another key metric to improve engagement is the average session length. This metric tells you how long visitors spend on your site and how they navigate to other pages. It’s also a valuable metric to identify the most popular content on your site and help you improve it for better performance. By identifying which content gets the most traffic, you can target the right audience.
Pageviews allow identification of your website’s most popular pages and blog posts. Pageviews that are steadily increasing indicate that your SEO and marketing efforts have been successful.
Digging into Traffic Data
Traffic is one of the most important KPIs you can measure, indicating how many people visit your website and helping you track your SEO efforts. Attribution is another key to maximizing website traffic. It lets you know who referred visitors, where they went, and how to optimize your website’s content and visitors’ journey around it.
Most successful marketers understand that website traffic can only be valuable when it is tracked. Page views alone are insufficient to provide the information needed to make informed decisions.
Google Analytics 4 can improve upon your understanding of e-commerce effectiveness, too. It includes qualitative insights to uncover more about your users’ interactions with your website and their behavior at various customer journey stages.
Another helpful metric to track, Sessions, measures how long users spend on your website. Sessions can be broken down into pageviews per session, bounce rate, and other metrics.
Beyond ‘Sessions’
Beyond pageviews or sessions, the focus of GA4 is on user-based insights gathered from events and interactions. This data provides insight into intent-based analysis, that is, what users are clicking on or viewing and what they’re trying to do. This introduces analysis of user engagement.
While marketers want to build relationships with their customers, demographics and psychographics are not as useful in predicting a customer’s plans for purchases, upgrades or churn as much as behavioral data.
Tracking what a customer does today is the best prognosticator of the next action to be taken. as it paints a better picture of their next action than who they are. GA4 can help companies predict customer actions across channels.
Smarter Insights to Improve Decision-Making and ROI
The key differentiators of Google Analytics 4—user-centric reporting and built-in modeling—are powerful tools for marketers to understand their customers’ journey.
While GA4 still means work from a company’s data analytics team, the tool can simplify data extraction, making it easier to take your data from GA4 and integrate it with a CRM or other data points.
Feel free to call me at 484-957-1246 or send an email to me at [email protected] to share your experiences, ideas, and other comments about your own marketing goals!
