Today, marketers tap into unparalleled consumer insights from vast digital data streams, unveiling behaviour, preferences, and interests. A good example is Google Analytics 4, which is a great tool for brands, bloggers and businesses looking to better understand their audience and monitor their performance. Does that sound like something you would be interested in? Well, we’re here to tell you more about how it can help you enhance your digital marketing strategy!

What is Google Analytics 4?

Also known by its acronym, GA4, it is the latest version of Google Analytics. This analytics tool helps inspect not only your website’s, but also app’s performance and user behaviour in deeper levels. In this way, providing valuable information about the users that visit your website and app, how they landed on it, how they engage with it, and what pages or screens they spend the most time on. 

Some of the main GA4 differentiators include the ability to follow the entire customer journey  across different platforms and the use of AI and machine learning for more detailed insights that explain the way that users interact with your website and app. 

Overall, Google Analytics 4 presents more opportunities for businesses to understand their audience, analysing customer usage metrics as well as tracking traffic. By leveraging this data, you can create highly targeted and personalised campaigns that resonate with your target audience, leading to increased engagement, conversions, and revenue. 

What to look out for in your Google Analytics 4 report?

Google Analytics 4 has multiple features, which might be daunting if it’s your first time using the tool. While all are useful, there are just a few that marketers need to focus on and monitor on a regular basis. The important topics you would like to keep an eye on are: Acquisition, Audience, Engagement, Conversions and Monetisation.

Acquisition

You can find out in-depth information about how visitors arrive at your site in the Acquisition section. With reports like “User Acquisition” and “User Acquisition: First User Medium”, GA4 gives you insight into how your audience discovered your site or app for the first time.

The First User Medium report focuses on marketing campaign traffic and it indicates the source by which people found your site, whether it was through email, CPC, organic search, or other types of traffic. On the other hand, the User Acquisition report is more extensive as it shows all default channels, and not only the campaign traffic. 

Reviewing the list of traffic channels can give you insight on which channels are introducing your website to your audience so you can more effectively plan customer acquisitions campaigns. Since the channels are listed based on their driving power, it’ll be easy for you to identify the channel that generates most of your site traffic. You can also dig deeper into each channel for further information. For instance, suppose you want to check which specific search queries are driving the highest volume of organic traffic, all you have to do is click on the “Organic Google search clicks by Organic Google search query” bar chart and a list of the top five GA4 organic search terms will be displayed.

Moreover, Google Analytics 4 gives you the opportunity to link your Google AdWords account to evaluate the effectiveness of your paid search campaigns. So, you could check the traffic generated by this channel with help of the “First user Google Ads ad group name” dimension. This can help you to better understand how users are interacting with your ads and landing pages, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimise your campaigns for better results.

Audience

Google Analytics 4 lets you create, edit, and archive audiences in ways that are relevant to your analysis. By using dimensions, metrics and events, you can segment your audience to meet up with your desired conditions.

The “Management table” shows predefined and customised audiences. There are only two predefined audiences available in this table, which are “All users'' and “Purchasers”. The first one refers to those users that have accessed your app or visited your website, while the latter are users that have completed a purchase. You can click on each of these two in case you want to get detailed information.

Moreover, if you want to choose from already existing segments, you can evaluate your audience based on certain criteria and/or metrics that were configured in available templates. For example, you can use the Demographics template to display information about the age, gender, language, interest IDs, and location dimensions regarding a particular audience. 

Understanding who your users are can help tailor your website and/or app based on their interests and preferences. For instance, if you were to find that most of your audience is female, then you could choose colours that would best appeal to them. You could even welcome them with a personalised introduction on your homepage, such as “Hi ladies!”

Learning about how old your web visitors are and about their gender will also allow you to create content that best resonates with them. For instance, if your audience was mainly made up of young visitors ranging between the ages of 18-24, then you could write a blog post about affordable travel ideas.

Finally, learning about where your visitors are from can influence your decisions relating to the different languages you’ll want to write your content in. The location dimension will list your audience countries, states and cities. Imagine that in first place is the UK and not too far behind is Mexico in second place. In this case, you might consider displaying your website content in both English and Latin American Spanish. Your products’ or services’ prices could also be adjusted so they’re not only shown in sterling pounds but in Mexican pesos too. 

Engagement

If you want to learn more about how your audience is interacting with your website and app, then you can check the Engagement section. This will show you which website pages and app screens are the most successful in terms of content, speed and the time visitors spend on each. 

Being able to see which pages and screens are highly viewed by your audience offers opportunities for improvement in relation to your web development strategy. For example, let’s say you find that the most popular pages in your website are your homepage and services page, but your blog page is slightly behind your services page in the third position. This would show you that your audience is highly interested in your blog articles. 

With the help of the “User stickiness” card you can also review the engagement by active users in a specific period of time and compare it to the engagement of a much broader time frame. Let’s say you want to know what’s the percentage of users who engaged with your website or app in the last 24 hours compared to those who engaged in the last 30 days. 

In this case, you’d like to keep an eye on the Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU) ratio. If users engaged with your website or app daily, the ratio will be 100%. However, if some users engaged with your site or app in the past month, but didn’t visit in the past day, the ratio will be less than 100%. 

Keeping an eye on the different engagement ratios will give you insight into how good you’re retaining users over time. In this way, helping you create tactics that encourage higher engagement and user retention. 

The Engagement section mostly helps you build awareness about your website and app content that visitors value the most. The information collected will help you gain a better understanding of your conversions and customer journey.

Conversions 

The way Google Analytics 4 measures goals performance is through events that are either created by the tool or by yourself. You may want to create events to view them as conversions and identify which channels, campaigns, locations and devices drive most of those conversions. 

Additionally, you can use the “Funnel” or “Path Exploration” reports to see the pages and paths that lead to conversion, while analysing the events and page interactions. This will not only display a page or screen visits, but the way people engage with them too. Once you’ve gained more experience using Google Analytics 4, it is recommended to leverage these reports to identify your customers’ journey and touch points through your website and mobile app. 

Data obtained from this report will allow you to focus your efforts on the campaigns and keywords that generate high conversions, and ease your decision about which campaigns to allocate less time and money on. 

Monetisation

The final section we recommend monitoring constantly is Monetisation, as it provides information regarding the campaigns, channels, keywords, email shots, devices, and locations that generated most revenue for an e-commerce website. 

If you have a mobile app to sell online, then it is especially useful to keep tabs on this report, since you’ll be able to check the sales that were completed on your app and your revenue for subscription upgrades, gaming purchases, and other relevant data, as well as your website data. 

In conclusion, data is critical for the decision-making process behind any successful marketing campaign and using analytics tools can make all the difference in your digital marketing strategy. More specifically, Google Analytics 4 can give you access to the necessary information to better understand your audience, strengthen your marketing strategy and ultimately, enhance further business development strategies. So, if you haven’t used it yet, then you might want to start now!

Contact us to help you with your digital marketing strategy and check out our blog for more tips that will make the difference in your business!