GA4 Property – The Next Generation of Google Analytics

Google Analytics has introduced a more intelligent Google Analytics in October 2020, the next generation of Google Analytics which is built on the foundation of the App + Web property. The Google Analytics App + Web property was brought in 2019 to measure the user engagement across app and website together. Earlier the website or business owners measure the app engagement with Google Analytics for Firebase and website engagement with Google Analytics separately, by which they didn't get the unified picture of user engagement across app and website.

The next generation of Google Analytics is named as the Google Analytics 4, in short GA4. GA4 is the 4th version of Google Analytics. The 3rd version Google Analytics (GA3) is a Universal Analytics which uses the gtag.js (Global Site Tag) JavaScript library. The latest version of Google Analytics, GA4 also uses gtag.js JavaScript library, but it uses a new measurement model called "Event+Parameter" model.

The Google Analytics 4 property is now the default experience for all new Google Analytics properties, whether anyone plan to use it for a website, an app, or both. The latest innovation of Google Analytics, GA4 property has advance machine learning at its core to automatically surface helpful insights and gives the website or business owners a complete understanding of their customers across devices and platforms.

Some features and benefits of Google Analytics 4 property are discussed below –

• The GA4 property is privacy-centric by design. So we can rely on Google Analytics even as industry changes like restrictions on cookies and identifiers create gaps in the user engagement data.
• This latest innovation will give us more useful insights to improve our marketing decisions and get better ROI.
• It can automatically alert us about the significant trends in the website or app data - like products seeing rising demand because of new customer needs.
• It can help us to invest in retaining customers more efficiently when the marketing budgets are under pressure by providing the churn probability.
• The GA4 property allows us to create custom audiences so that we can analyze group specific consumer behavior to better understand why some customers are likely to spend more than others.

• It provides deeper integration with other Google marketing products such as Google Ads, which helps us reaching the customers with more relevant and helpful experiences to improve user experiences and ROI.
• The latest Google Analytics innovation can give us more complete understanding of how customers interact with our business. We can see the complete picture across website and app, for example, if a customer first discovers a business from an ad on the web, then later install the app of that business and make purchases there.
• The new analytics gives us better understanding of customers across their entire life cycle, from acquisition to conversion and retention.

The GA4 property is now the default experience for all new Google Analytics properties in which Google is investing in future improvements. The latest Google Analytics innovation helps us understand the combined impact of all our marketing efforts by letting us measure the app and web interactions together.

Create a new Google Analytics 4 property for the existing Universal Analytics property for a website and upgrade the existing Google Analytics for Firebase property to the GA4 property to take the advantage of the latest analytics innovation without changing the existing Google Analytics implementation.