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Universal Analytics VS Google Analytics 4
Hey, guys! Decided to share my thoughts about GA4 and hear out yours. I tried to avoid it for a long time, But now I have a new client and I didn’t find an opportunity to install UA … so I’ve decided that time has come and I need to dive in and figure it out. It appeared it’s not that bad and that GA4 even has a lot of pros. So, here’s what I discovered for a short period of using it:
* If you already have UA you can add GA4 and use both of them.
* Different bounce rate counting – in GA4 if a user spends more than 10 sec on the first page or scrolls to the second screen it won’t be counted as 100% of bounce rate. Which in UA would count as 100% bounce rate.
* Difference in tracking IDs – unlike UA, in GA4 there is a single user journey collected from all the data that is associated with the same user ID.
* GA4 events-based model wins UA sessions-based model – which I think is awesome and gives much more realistic data to analyse and better understanding of how the user interacts with on-page elements.Do you use GA4 already? Please share your findings and insights
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9 Replies
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FYI- you can still install UA, its hidden in ‘advance settings’ when you initially make the property
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Hate ‘classic” UA, but hate GA4 more than UA.
Anyway, thank you for your experience.
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I think I like it. The conversion tracking can be a little weird to setup at first. Sometimes the interface feels like it’s not completed yet.
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I do set up both but mostly use Universal Analytics and yes it is possible.
Hint: use Google tag manager…
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I think GA4 is great. I think there is a misconception that it provides a more out-of-the-box solution than it is. But its rather bare bones to start with. Events and parameters need to be set up quite deliberately with the use of Tag Manager and custom definitions used around these. It’s debug mode is amazing.
It really shines when you use it with BigQuery and/or Data Studio.
But you really should be using both UA and GA4 at this time IMHO.
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Even though you may not like or want to use GA4, you might have to in the future – but how will you use it without data?
That’s why you should install it from the get-go, whether you intend on using it or not, the data collection begins and will be available to you when/if you need it later.
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Its funny – neither are any good and GA4 is useless from a channel source. Google needs to stop trying new colors on the inside of the box and step out of the box entirely. But Google has failed at everything it touches apart from building a great search engine. Literally everything.
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I have own roll your own and GA seems to not register a lot of page views, lots of them
seems everyone misses lots of them. my tool seems them all.
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Can you run both simultaneously on the same site?
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