GA4: Providing Unrivaled Insight into Your Customer Experience

This exciting new analytics tool has a host of advanced features to help fully understand the customer experience and journey.

Since Winter 2022, marketers, analysts, product managers, and more have been dreading the loss of their beloved Universal Analytics (GA), which will sunset July 1, 2023, and be replaced by the next generation technology, GA4.

While the loss of a tried and tested platform will be challenging, there are many new opportunities with this new platform that will help you get to the heart of the customer experience on your website and app.

Find out how this tool can illuminate your CX in new and exciting ways. 

Cross-Device and Platform Analysis 

While GA4 has many new exciting features, one of the most interesting is its ability to track the customer journey across different devices and platforms (web+app). 

Because GA relies on browser cookies to track sessions, it was never good at cross-device tracking. For example, if a user changed browsers when visiting a website, they would be considered a different user. While it had some ability to track users according to a unique ID, it was a secondary feature. Meanwhile, app-based tracking required a separate analytics tool from Google. 

GA4, on the other hand, can present a cross-platform and cross-device view of how users are interacting with your website and app. It relies on four data points to achieve this:

1. User ID 
2. Google Signals 
3. Device ID 
4. If none of these are available, it falls back to machine-learning based modeling

With this technology, you can even drill down to see details about an individual user, such as how they were first acquired and a timeline of the actions they have taken on your website across their entire digital journey, even if they changed devices or platforms!  

Get granular with 300 plus events/30 conversions  

On its most fundamental level, GA4 is an event-driven platform. While GA has event tracking capabilities that operate in a similar way, GA4 takes event and conversion tracking to an entirely new level.

Any time a user interacts with your website, it’s logged as an event. GA4 comes with a whole host of built-in event tracking capabilities. There are:

• Automatic events like page views and user engagement 
• Enhanced measurements like scrolls and file downloads 
• Recommended events like logins and a host of ecommerce-related options

All of these can be configured with the push of a button, although you still have the option of custom tagging for even more granular data collection. One powerful benefit of event-tracking is how they can collect and send additional information such as: 

• User ID or other identifier
• The value of purchase
• The title of the page a user visited

Conversion tracking is also much simpler on GA4. Events can simply be  labeled as a conversion with just a push of a button, which can then bring the power of machine learning to understand your customer’s conversion journey. The "predictive audiences" feature is particularly powerful, based on conversion data, which you can read about in the next section. 

Predictive Audiences 

With advanced machine learning techniques, GA4 is able to provide “predictive audiences” on a customer’s potential next action in their user journey.  These prebuilt segments include customers “likely to make a purchase in the next 7 days”, those “not likely to” and those “not likely to visit your website at all over the same period”. 

By comparing these segments and others, you can analyze past behaviors to see if any element of their customer experience drives purchases more than others. Furthermore, thanks to integration with various Google Ad platforms, you can remarket these segments differently. Marketing teams can boost retargeting efforts based on users that are churning, and send them to targeted pages with tailored messaging that supports conversion. Your analytics platform just became your advertising hub!

Advanced Funnel Analysis Capabilities

GA4 has provided a next generation improvement into its funnel analysis, which allows you to break down each step in the customer journey from user action or page to another. You can see where users leave your website,  content that is effectively driving next steps, and what further improvements you can make to your customer journey. 

You can break it down by segments to compare performance across different variables, be it geography, previous action (like a file download), or the destination event. The power of the funnel analysis is that you can cross-compare, much like with predictive audiences. 

Is there a file download that is contributing to a higher conversion rate? You can make a regular part of your on-page calls to action. Are users on mobile devices dropping off your conversion funnel at higher rates than desktop? You may have a UX problem. All of these can create actionable insights to improve your customer journeys at every step. 

Anomaly Detection  

Anomaly detection is another feature that has been enhanced thanks to the power of machine learning. It is able to analyze thousands of website data points and signals and notify users if there is anything unusual, both good and bad. 

The default anomaly detection is available on the homepage in insights. With this user-friendly feature, all you need to do is click “insights” and it will tell you about changes in normal website patterns. For example, if a piece of content has spiked in visits or if your website is converting at a higher level (perhaps because of a UX change).

You can also configure anomaly detection to be targeted to segments or audiences that you would like to monitor, such as app users from the United States, or other countries that have previously targeted your website with bot traffic. 

Similarly, you can create customized anomaly detection for just about any part of your website. This is perfect for monitoring the impact of website changes like CTAs, design, or functionality, leveraging GA4 advanced modeling capabilities to understand the impact. 

Take Your CX Analysis to the Next Level

While nobody likes changes, GA4 makes it worthwhile. By providing robust features, advanced machine learning capabilities and granular user details, you can get unparalleled insight into your customer experience. Best of all, it’s free! 

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