If you have Google Analytics set up to monitor the traffic on your wedding business website, you should have received alerts about changes from July, 2023. Easy Weddings Digital Marketing Manager, Dan Wild, explained why GA4 is coming in a recent webinar on marketing during the low season. Here’s what we learned.
What is Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?
By now, you should have received emails and alerts from Google about the changes to your Google Ads or Google Analytics account. From July 1, 2023, your current Google Analytics account will no longer process data.
GA4 is essentially a brand new analytics product. It’s fantastic, but it is a big change from what you would be experiencing with Google’s current Universal Analytics (UA).
It aims to help deal with some of the privacy concerns that have become very front of mind for users today. It increases relevant data and combines that with our analytics functions with applications like Firebase or any other tool that you may have.
If we don’t have good measurements, we can’t get good results. GA4 aims to address this.
The change is also meant to be more user-friendly. It might take some time to migrate, but once you get it there, it will be quite impressive!
We have to understand though, that this change isn’t astronomical. It is a big deal at the moment, but that’s just because we’ve lost our history.
Google Analytics hasn’t always been Google Analytics its whole life — it has been a series of different things starting first with Urchin in 2005, and then Universal Analytics in 2012. GA4 is the first shake shakeup we’ve had in this way since that move from Urchin to Google Analytics over a decade ago, so we need to be mindful that we’ll see some changes ahead.
There’s a lot of literature out there from Google, and it is a straightforward process to at least get the tracking code installed. Although, it’s a little bit more work to get all of your conversions in.
Why is Google Analytics changing?
Google’s goal is to provide clarity of information. Its business model is about finding information easily and providing the results, so Google Analytics is no different. It’s a chance to show site owners clear activity and a clear picture of what’s happening on their website.
Some features of GA4 include:
- Privacy improvements
- Increasing relevant data
- Allowing more flexible reporting
- Combined reporting with mobile applications; and
- Ease of use for users
The purpose of the change to GA4 is to send users less information by default. However, it allows you to be more focused in your events so you can capture more information once it’s been set up in the right way.
GA4 will take a bit of getting used to, but it is the best alternative in its class.
What do I need to do?
For continued website measurement, it is critical that you migrate your UA property settings to GA4. If that’s not done, Google will copy your settings to an existing GA4 property, by reusing existing site tags, and you will begin to lose data on July 1, 2023. Learn how to migrate your settings and make the switch to GA4, here.
For the handful of clients that Easy Weddings provides ongoing website hosting website services for, our tech team has already migrated them to GA4. However, we don’t currently provide ongoing web hosting service for the majority of suppliers on Easy Weddings. Those clients will need to migrate to GA4 themselves, or hire a web analytics specialist to do it for you.
We hope these tips will help you prepare for GA4. More information on the changes are available on the Google Analytics support page, here.
If you aren’t yet online with Easy Weddings and would like to see how we can help increase your brand presence and help book more weddings, submit an online enquiry form, here, and we’ll be in touch.
