Why You Should Upgrade to Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (G.A.4.) has made waves since its launch, and Google has been nudging people to upgrade for the past two years. Why? Google is essentially making it mandatory to upgrade. The company announced it would be shutting off Google Analytics Universal Analytics (U.A.) on July 1, 2023. Universal Analytics was the most recent version of Google Analytics and likely the version you have had running on your website for many years. This action by Google means that if you choose not to upgrade to G.A.4. that:

• Your website will stop collecting data on user activity as of that date
• All of the historical data from U.A. will be deleted – TBD on the timeline for that.

Those are some serious implications for your law firm’s digital marketing. 

Keep reading to learn more about G.A.4. and why you should upgrade. 

What is Google Analytics 4?

On July 31, 2019, Google introduced App + Web measurement(1) with the slogan “start measuring across platforms.” Google said it made this switch to unify customer journeys on desktop and mobile. This tiny switch launched an entire new brand we now know as Google Analytics 4 (G.A.4.).

What’s the Difference Between U.A. and G.A.4.?

Sessions v. events

The biggest difference between G.A.4. and U.A. is the data model each is based on. 

Universal Analytics is based on sessions, pageviews, and hits (events) – imagine that each time you visit a website you are creating a session. U.A. also forced us to work within the taxonomy of event category, action, and label.

“A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions.” (“How a Web Session Is Defined in Universal Analytics – Analytics Help”)

I’m a sports person, so I think of sessions as a period in hockey, for example. Every goal, every hit, turnover, line change happens within that period. The same idea applies for sessions. If I arrive on your website, I view the homepage, then navigate to a practice area page, then download a pdf, then sign up for your newsletter, and then I leave. Everything I did happened in that one period of time that I was on the site, that one session.

An important distinction here is that everything I did in my journey above is NOT created equally under U.A. Pageviews were a specifically defined measurement; downloading the PDF and signing up for the newsletter were custom events. They are defined in different ways under U.A., which makes them tricky to compare against one another, like the apples and oranges above. In aggregate that limits our ability to analyze our website data. 

Google Analytics 4 is based on events.

Under G.A.4., every single thing a user does on the website is counted as an event. This is great news for us, because:

• It allows us to compare a myriad of different things against each other; and
• It allows for pretty sophisticated and unique customization, meaning you can build custom events using what is important to your business.

Now we can compare oranges to oranges!!!

It can be challenging to understand the importance of this change but from a high-level G.A.4. allows you to determine where the user came from on your website, what call to action (C.T.A.) you are using, and much more, depending on the detail of your configuration. The flexibility of the measurement allows legal marketers to track what matters to their firm. 

Under universal analytics the data we were tracking came in a session – and was tied to that URL, in that session. Let’s say I signed up for your webinar at lawfirm.com/event – the signup event would have had to have been defined within the confines of the below taxonomy:

Now that’s great if you remember to track everything as such and have a robust data dictionary, but that data is not telling us things like:

• where the user came from on the site prior to registering–maybe a blog post is driving signups, but you wouldn’t know that with U.A.; and
• there is nowhere to track the C.T.A. of the button within those fields, which could limit A/B testing.

Under the user-focused G.A.4., that same interaction of a webinar signup comes with a lot more information since everything is event-based. 

Privacy Focus

Privacy is a hot-button issue these days and for good reason. Here in the U.S., we don’t yet have something as thorough as the European Economic Area’s General Data Protection Regulation (G.D.P.R.), but many states have started rolling out their own privacy regulations as it relates to online data. 

So what does this mean for G.A.4.? There are a few things to unpack here.

IP Addresses

An IP address is like the home address of your computer. It’s how your device is identified by the services that you interact with on the internet. Under Google Analytics U.A. – IP addresses were passed to the service and it was on the user (you) in this case to filter them out. As we know passing any personally identifiable information through Google Analytics is against the terms of service.

In G.A.4., IP addresses are no longer stored. One less thing for you to worry about!

Google Signals

Until now, analytics companies have been leveraging third-party cookies that ID you on the web, and tell analytics companies, and advertisers alike what you like, don’t like, etc. Those annoying ads that follow you from a Google Search about winter boots over to Facebook? All thanks to third-party cookies. 

Well, sometime in 2024 Google is shutting down the bakery. No more cookies. They’re going gluten-free. Not because they want to slim down for beach season, but because privacy legislation has made third-party cookies a big no-no in today’s privacy-centric climate. Apple and Mozilla have already cut them out.

So with third-party cookies coming off the diet plan, how can companies get a full-plate view of their customers? Companies are taking varied approaches. Many of them seem to be building their own data repositories.  

Google Signals is Google’s way of sharing user information with law firms that use G.A.4. If you fire up Google Chrome and are signed in, Google is collecting data about you. That data is then stored somewhere at Google and if companies enable Google Signals, that data is then aggregated and anonymized to allow the company using G.A.4. to do things like cross-device tracking and remarketing for advertising. If you plan to use Google Signals, make sure you update your privacy policy. Read more about Google signals here. 

There are a few other privacy features in G.A.4., which you can read more about here. I’ll mention a final one because it is a pretty big deal. 

Data Processing Location

Google Analytics has been in its share of hot water across the pond lately. In Austria and France, G.A. was found to be in violation of G.D.P.R. because it required the transfer of data from the E.U. to the U.S. for processing. A recent update from Google allows for data processing in the EU now, but I suspect this isn’t the last time Google will face scrutiny for privacy. 

Other Reasons To Upgrade

Aside from the drop-dead date Google is enforcing on its users (again, it’s July 1, 2023!!!), there are a few other reasons to upgrade your Google Analytics.

• G.A.4. offers easier cross-device tracking
• The reporting possibilities of G.A.4. are more robust than that of U.A.
• G.A.4. is user-focused, meaning your firm can focus on website users at a granular level
• G.A.4. offers a free integration to Google BigQuery if you are interested in stepping up your data analysis
• Scrolls, Video, Exit tracking, all come out of the box (to an extent) with G.A.4. You had to manually customize these in G.A.3. U.A.
• Firms can more easily control and respect user privacy with G.A.4.

If you need help with Google Analytics 4, let us know! We wrote a post about installing a basic version of G.A.4. here. Don’t let Google delete your historical data. 

(1)  Ketchum, Russell. “A New Way to Unify App and Website Measurement in Google Analytics.” Google, 31 July 2019, blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/new-way-unify-app-and-website-measurement-google-analytics/?_ga=2.145702130.73583661.1646080530-215962983.1632513725.