Google Analytics 4’s Benefits to Improve Conversions for Marketing Campaigns Has Arrived
In today’s hyper-digital world, businesses are forced to recognize technology as the bedrock of consumer acquisition and retention success. COVID lockdowns propelled marketers to take a hard right toward data-driven marketing campaigns. Data-driven campaigns lend insight into what/how the customer is thinking and behaving. A marketer’s ability to improve conversions of marketing campaigns is paramount to business growth and to their career trajectory.
We can all agree that with the rise of data, analytics and AI, marketers have more powerful tools at their disposal than ever before. We have heard time and time again that data-backed customer insights are a revolutionary tool to enhance and improve marketing efforts at every step of the marketing/sales funnel. The promise to improve conversions for marketing campaigns has always sounded great but was difficult to achieve. Finally there is a way to capture the riches of this marketing promise and delight in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow with ease, thanks to Google’s new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) analytics model.
Leveraging the Power of Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 is the latest invention of Google, launched in October 2020. Some of its key features have been touted as just what marketers need to succeed in 2021. Among many of its characteristics is its ability to improve leads and conversions for the respective company’s marketing campaigns. Since conversion is the ultimate goal that will generate revenue, here are my top 3 updates on how the widely lauded GA4 can boost conversions it for your business:
1. Focus On The User’s Journey
Path analysis of a user’s journey can now be stitched together between sessions and even between websites and apps. GA4 provides a platform for both website and app individually, as well as both the mobile app and website together. This provides a holistic view of user interactions on both platforms, allowing you stronger forecasting into customer behavior. GA4’s path analysis starts with an initial screen or an event. Following the initial screen, GA4 will allow you to see the following top-five screens viewed, or on-site events triggered by a user. You can actually expand the user path visual to see what users did in each step.
For example, a user visited your website using a laptop and carried out an activity such as ‘add to cart’. The user then downloaded your mobile app onto their smartphone. GA4 allows you to stitch together the activities cross-device to give you a combined report of the user’s journey with your company. This allows the company to make more informed decisions regarding their marketing campaigns, pertaining to when and why a customer may leave the funnel before reaching completion.
2. Allows Companies to Use Predictive Analytics for Enhanced Marketing Performance
Predictive marketing analytics is the need of the hour for businesses today. It’s what will give marketers a competitive advantage. Predictive analytics provides crucial data that can then be used for planning, strategizing and deploying an effective marketing campaign for the company.
Seeing the importance of Predictive Analytics, Google Analytics 4 has stepped in and has stepped up. GA4 has revamped data collection, analysis and processing. One of the key changes in GA4 is the predictive metrics that give deeper insights into customer behavior and their potential purchase habits, such as their likelihood to buy a certain product.
Currently, GA4 has 3 predictive metrics for planning a well thought-out and effective marketing campaign:
- Purchase Probability: the tendency of a user who has been active in the past 28 days to convert in the next 7 days
- Churn Probability: the possibility that a user who has been active for the past 7 days will not be active in the next 7 days
- Revenue Prediction: the estimate of revenue generated from a user who has been active in the past 28 days
3. Smarter Insights and Machine Learning
Keeping up with the latest requirements of our hyper-digital age, GA4 has been built with a foundation in AI and machine learning. Now that customer expectations for searching for more personalized and relevant experiences have increased, machine learning has become an indispensable tool to meet these increasing assistive demands.
GA4 provides marketers a list of common events that can be used to create custom events. With the integration of these events in GA4, machine learning provides better reporting trends of our digital visitors. So, in essence, GA4 helps create smarter customer segmentations as well as more creative and customer-centric marketing campaigns that will drive more conversions, backed and remediated by real-time data.
Do You Want to Increase Conversions For Your Business?
If you employ the right marketing tools and strategies, you can drive leads and increase conversions for your business in no time. Now that we know the integral role Google Analytics 4 plays in enhancing and improving your marketing strategy, why not leverage it to further your business goals?
Click here to sign up for an executive webinar on the must-know fast-facts about Google Analytics. Within just 30 minutes, learn how to effectively use it’s benefits to improve conversions for marketing campaigns. This is an educational experience for digital marketers, growth insight professionals and digital advertisers. In this short webinar, walk away gaining a competitive advantage over others to achieve more marketing results, more conversions and future proof your marketing career. Leverage the power of the future of the business landscape.
Learn more about Google Analytics, read 4 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to GA4. This blog shares the roll out plan of GA4 and the best way to prepare for the deprecation of the current Google Analytics Universal Analytics set up.
Thank you for sharing wonderful insights about Google Analytics 4 (GA4), we had implemented GA4 in our website https://www.beckandbulow.com/products, unfortunately GA4 analytics are not triggering (not tracking). Still we are getting or managing with traditional Google Analytics only, can anyone help us how or where we are having problem for not tracking visitors in GA4, we know GA4 is a great tool for audience, and other types of features to implement marketing strategies! Thank you for your great efforts to make this post wonderful! Keep it up!
Hi Chris, We are glad you enjoyed this post! We would be happy to help you with the issue you are encountering with GA4. One of our Digital Analytics Consultants will reach out to you via email shortly. Thanks!
Thanks for the post. (And for having a comments section on your blog!!! Way to many blogs have removed comments, which I find to be so valuable).
A few question / comments about the points:
1. Focus On The User’s Journey
One use case given was being able to model the Customer Journey cross device. However, GA4’s user identification mechanisms are very sub-par. The user needs to be logged in order for GA4 to use the user_id as the primary identifier; when they user is not logged in (or logged out and THEN logged in) there is no cross device usability.
Even building a Closed Funnel analysis fails if the user logs in at some point during the funnel.
2. Allows Companies to Use Predictive Analytics for Enhanced Marketing Performance
Have you seen this happening effectively in the real world? My experience is that the predictions (even when GA4 is provided with very large data sets) are not accurate.
3. Smarter Insights and Machine Learning
Do you have any examples? I understand that this is their product direction, but I haven’t come across any examples myself yet.
Hi Yehoshua! Always happy to hear feedback and get questions from the reader/audience, so thank you for leaving a comment.
Regarding focus on user journey, Google has some good references to explain how they are currently delivering customer journey data leveraging Google signals. So yes, a user needs to be logged in for UA/GA4 to collect their user_id as an identifier for customer cross divide journey mapping. However, if no user ID is collected, then GA4 uses information from Google Signals and device ID to identify a user. Here are two support docs reference: [GA4] User-ID for cross-platform analysis and [GA4] Activate Google signals for Google Analytics 4 properties.
Regarding your question about predictive analytics: we hosted a webinar about this topic just last month, and fielded similar questions about the accuracy of the predictions. Our team encourages everyone to test it out and give the tool the data and time for it to work. We now have about a year of working with GA4 under our belt, and still learn exciting new things everyday as the Google teams continue to improve the tool. We anticipate that as Google releases more updates in the next 2 years we should be in forefront to better understand accuracies.
For your last question about machine learning, our team is currently testing this functionality with some of our clients, and we hope to be able to share our success stories in the future.
We hope this helps! Let us know if you have any further questions.