About three years ago, Google introduced Google Analytics 4. This is one of the biggest updates to one of the most important tools anyone who cares about website data uses. Google says that it is meant to streamline measurement standards as well as help businesses succeed. Since this is such a big and important update, you might be wondering how it affects your job or business. In this article, we will be looking at what has changed and what you need to know about this update.

What Has Changed

In short, a lot has changed. In the past, Google Analytics used sessions, and this is what most people are used to. This new version is based on events and users. This means that each user interaction on a website or app where you use Google Analytics 4 will be treated as a standalone and separate event.

In the past, the session-based model that was used grouped user interactions within set time frames. For example, for a user who visited a website and read four articles, that would be counted as one session instead of four events and one conversion.

The event-based model is meant to help marketers benefit from better path and cross-platform analysis. The Event-based model is also meant to help Google Analytics be more flexible so that it can predict user behaviour better.

Moving Away from Obsolete Methodologies

Any marketer who uses Google Analytics, as all of them should, is aware of Universal Analytics. These measurements depend on independent sessions, the desktop web, and data collected by and from cookies. Google says that these measurement methodologies have become obsolete.

Google Analytics 4 is meant to operate across platforms, whether the user is on a computer or mobile device, and not rely on data collected from cookies. The main issue with cookies, and the one that Google is trying to get away from, is privacy.

Cookies can not only track you around the web, but they can also pass on any information they collect to third parties. People are becoming increasingly wary of their privacy and what enterprises do with their data, and Google is responding to this by eliminating the privacy concerns that arise from the use of cookies.

What Does This Mean For You?

The pertinent question is, how does it affect your business? There is no simple answer to this question because you cannot compare the Google Analytics version most people are using now with the fourth version. Why?

Because Google Analytics 4 is a completely new version of Analytics that has been rewritten from the ground up for the future. Google is leaving behind how it used to handle users and data in the past and embracing new practices that will fit better with how it predicts we will use the internet in the future.

Google Analytics is a crucial tool that anyone who cares about website data should be using. It has been in use for over 15 years, but the internet has changed so much in that time. This has necessitated a new version of Google Analytics, and we now have Google Analytics 4. The internet is changing and so should how we collect and analyse user data.