December 19, 2023
The introduction of a new tracking model and features within GA4 offers greater insight into user behavior
Adam Brodsky | Director, Analytics
GA4’s implementation of a new tracking model and features means that it’s important to think about how the changes in tracking might improve the way you track your website. The new event-based tracking model puts user interactions front and center. Previously, our web analytics were more pageview-based and we would tag events only when necessary. GA4 is built around these interactions, giving us far greater insight into our users’ behavior on our site.
GA4 is built so centrally around user behavior that it includes a new feature called “Enhanced Measurement”, which automatically captures basic information on a wide array of user interactions:
This is great for smaller websites without enough resources to fully tag their website. There are limitations to what these features can track, however. It’s important to determine whether or not the Enhanced Measurement tracking will provide enough detail about these interactions. Those limitations are:
Fortunately GA4’s custom event model makes tracking levels of detail easy to do. Custom events can be tracked on any interaction and even on page views of particularly important pages. These events can also incorporate Parameters, essentially adding custom dimension capability to the interactions you track. This allows for even greater slicing and dicing of data.
Once tracked, these interactions can then be set as Conversions which allow for more data on the behaviors of users leading up to these actions - giving us actionable insight into how we may optimize our website design / flow and our marketing to better funnel new users towards these conversions.
Especially for businesses selling products online, expert solution design is imperative to ensure all important interactions are tracked properly and custom dimensions are set up to take full advantage of the rich data being collected.
Cross Device Tracking Improvements in GA4
GA4 initially came out of the gate providing user data based in part on Google Signals, a technology Google uses to help fill in gaps in returning user behavior. Google Signals essentially helps identify numbers of users based on Google’s own user data set, which is obviously very large. This enabled GA4 to offer cross-device and user journey analysis without the need to implement a user ID system and initially seemed like an excellent solution.
Privacy concerns meant, however, that even this aggregated data had to have protections in place to ensure that Google Analytics customers couldn’t dig so far into the data that they could potentially identify individuals based on their Google Signals data. Thus, Google placed threshold limits on that data that would require a certain minimum number of users, otherwise it would not incorporate that data into the report. As businesses have begun using GA4 more, they found that those threshold limits were almost always bumped into with Google Signals data enabled. This caused reports to display incomplete data and frustrated users especially in smaller businesses where web traffic numbers weren’t as high.
Google responded by giving GA4 clients the option to disable Google Signals data from being used in reporting identity - essentially limiting it to how it was used in Universal Analytics, only appearing in the Demographics reports. This option proved to be necessary for most businesses to be able to rely on the data their reports were showing them, and so Google made the announcement in December 2023 that Google Signals would no longer be used in reporting identity after February 2024. This returns the analytics landscape to the previous reliance on cookie and user ID data to determine user journeys.
Cookies aren’t what they used to be, though - privacy legislation such as GDPR and CCPA/CPRA limit what can be tracked, and industry standards like ITP proactively set limits on cookie expiration. Add in the proliferation of “Do Not Track” settings and cookie blockers, and reliance solely on cookies is a much more limited proposition than ever before.
This just reinforces User ID as the standard for customer journey analysis, using your customers’ accounts as the identifier. This brings the added benefit of allowing greater insights into the full customer life cycle while still preserving their privacy online. Some reliance on cookies will still be necessary for new user acquisition of course, since we can’t identify customers we haven’t already established a relationship with. Fortunately, the transition from a cookie-based newly acquired user to an established, user-ID based customer is seamless within GA4.
A Word About Server-Side Tracking and Cookie Deprecation
One of the major topics among digital marketers over the past few years has been the looming deprecation of cookie technology. Third-party cookies (those set by vendors rather than the business’ own website) are already on the way out, and the transition to a “cookieless future” without even first-party cookies is often discussed. While that deadline continues to be pushed out due to lack of a viable replacement solution, it’s never a bad idea to get ahead of the game and start preparing for how businesses will need to implement analytics tracking once that standard is finally reached.
Server-side tracking using Google Tag Manager is the recommended solution for this. Simply put, it works by capturing the usage of the website from the server responses rather than information gleaned from users’ browsers (client-side tracking). It’s more complicated and takes a bit more time than a standard GA4 setup. It will also require more hands-on work from developers and experts, meaning increased costs as well. While the details could fill an entire article on their own, what’s most important at this point is beginning to prepare for that implementation within the next two years.
See the first installment in our GA4 series here: Understanding the New Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Looking to get ahead of the game? Connect with MERGE and partner with our team of experts to help prepare you for the challenges of today and tomorrow!
