What is Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and why is it critical for your business?

GA4 is the next generation of Google Analytics and the most important platform for your business in 2023.

It’s a complete re-imagining of what data collection and analysis could be, designed to take advantage of the opportunities presented by big data and machine learning.

Bringing together everything that worked well in Universal Analytics (the current, older model) with brand-new features that provide a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey across devices.

Including options to comply with current and future data protection regulations and the capability to fill in the gaps using machine learning in the cookie-less future of analytics.

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How is WePlay helping rights holders, event organisations, broadcasters, brands, and media companies?

WePlay are experts in Growth marketing and appreciate how in the modern marketing landscape it is essential to know your audience and accurately judge the impact of your audience.

With the GA4 integrations we have established, we have already helped OTT platforms understand the effect of communications to new and existing customers, facilitating expedited processes over retention strategy vs new acquisition marketing.

As well as assisting mass participation organisations in developing a clearer understanding of the impact of all marketing channels and live streaming environments to de-duplicate all paid attribution, to generate a clear and wholesome perspective over the impact of all paid media.

These are just a few use cases where WePlay has embraced the new analytics platform to help its clients develop a better understanding of what is working, and why and create a more accurate image of the impact of different marketing channels.

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Why is this essential now?

Universal Analytics is coming to the end of its life. On July 1 2023, and will simply stop functioning and will not ingest any new data.

If you still rely on Universal Analytics, we recommend that you prepare to use GA4 as soon as possible, to build some historical data prior to the hard cut-off.

It is recommended to run both platforms in parallel during this period.

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What’s different in the new setup?

GA4 is completely different from Universal Analytics from data collection to user interface.

The migration can be a large undertaking, but those who embrace this quickly will benefit from a multitude of new features.

Such as;

• Insights and predictions powered by machine learning algorithms that enrich your data to predict future behaviours.
• Improved audience integration with Google Ads allowing you to create custom audiences based on attributes and experiences in a particular time frame.
• Customer lifecycle-framed reporting to understand users have been behaving since they first visited the website.

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What are the key benefits of the new platform?

This cookie-less platform will empower marketers to know more about our audiences and the effectiveness of their marketing.

A few features that really stand out are:

Predictive audiences

• Predictive audiences are an exciting new feature in GA4, making use of your first party data and machine learning to find the right audiences in an automated fashion
• Through machine learning and decisions trees, we can now ascertain who are key audiences and enable more targeted ads to those who have similar behavioural patterns – in a quicker and more efficient fashion

Attribution

• GA4 offers cross-channel data-driven attribution (DDA) for free – meaning its easier to see the effect of all channels together
• Providing a quicker, easier, and more thorough way of de-duplicating multiple channels and get close to a single source of truth
• This can be justifying the effect of META and Google together or tie in all trackable channels across paid, owned, and organic
• Making it much faster and simpler to get a more well-rounded perspective of the impact of your advertising

Unification

• GA4 provides a platform to consolidate data from both web, iOS, and Android into the same property and an option to see it separately
• GA4 uses the same schema for tracking user behaviour across web and app, which was not possible in Universal Analytics
• Data unification of the tracking schema allows for a more accurate measurement of the customer journey across devices and platforms, mitigating cross-device attribution issues

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How can WePlay help?

WePlay is a growth marketing agency specialising in helping our clients achieve commercial success.

With GA4 we are able to help develop a better understanding of what is working and why.

We would be happy to guide your migration from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. Ensuring a smooth transition before the Universal Analytics sunsets in July 2023.

Our analytics team has a wealth of experience in this area and is equipped to help manage integration, set up, audits and data management challenges.

If you’ve not yet migrated to GA4 and would like to discuss your measurement setup with us, please email advertising@weplay.co

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