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What’s the office consensus now on GA4 vs Google Ads tracking?
I’ve spent the last hour reading threads about this and there’s no agreement among them. By the sounds of it, GA4 should be doing everything that Google Ads tracking is capable of. Is this true or not?
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1 Reply
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Different attribution models, mainly. Check out last click versus first click versus data driven.
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Not quite.
Obviously, Google Analytics is deduplicated, while Google Ads is not. Whether this is an upside or a downside depends on lots of factors, it can be both.
Beyond this, many functionalities are exclusive to one side or the other. (Enhanced Conversions, for instance). A discussion of this would go way out of bounds, there are a ton of factors to consider.Finally, if you are in Europe, or bound by other privacy legislation, there are differences in both the requirements for user consent and the modeling / extrapolation possibilities if you don’t get it.
So it really depends.
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When it comes to conversion tracking it’s always Ads Tracking all the way. There’s not a single reason why you’d want GA4 as your main conversion tracking source.
When it comes to using the tools for insights check out /u/wittgk . Their response is pretty much to the point. It’s two different tools, for different purposes using different methods. There’s no winner, not even a contest.
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GA4 is not currently doing everything that Google Ads tracking is capable of. For example, GA4 does not yet support cross-device tracking, which is a key feature of Google Ads tracking.
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GA4 is catching more conversions than the google ads tag for my lead gen clients.
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I’ve been using GA4 as the main source of truth and then importing those conversions into Google Ads, unless we have Offline Conversion Imports in place for the account. I agree that GA4 seems to be doing everything the Google Ads tracking is doing and then some. Also I appreciate not needing the multiple code snippets on the site.
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