Last Updated on February 7, 2024 by Nathaniel Tower
If you have a website, you need data.
It’s as simple as that.
You need to know how people are using your website, where they are coming from, how many people are coming, and what the trends are. Along with a lot of other information.
If you don’t collect and analyze this data, then there is little point in having a website. After all, your website exists to attract people, tell them a story, and get them to buy your product or service (or maybe just to read your content).
Fortunately, it’s easy to track all of this information thanks to Google Analytics.
However, a lot of people have lost faith in Google Analytics following the release of Google Analytics 4 and sunset of Universal Analytics in 2023.
But here’s the good news for you: Google Analytics 4 is actually better than its predecessor.
Let’s look at six reasons why GA4 is better than UA (even if a lot of people complain about it all the time).
Reasons Google Analytics 4 is better than Universal Analytics
Although GA4 might seem more difficult to use at first glance, it’s actually a lot easier to set up and structure your data properly. The main problem is that it’s different, so people think it’s harder. It may require more steps to set up properly, but the steps themselves are all pretty easy.
Automatic event tracking
The first reason GA4 is better than UA is because of automatic event tracking. In UA, you had to set up every event on your own, which was a big lift if you weren’t technical. By default, GA4 tracks page views, scroll depth, clicks (both external and internal), site searches, form submissions (we’ll talk about this more later), downloads, and video interactions. That’s just about everything most website owners need to track!
All of this event tracking is enabled by default when you set up your GA4 property. Life can’t get much easier than that.
Event tracking is much more powerful in GA4
As if auto event tracking wasn’t enough, Google decided to give us more control over how we collect data when we do set up our own events.
You can now track as many custom parameters as you want in a logically structured way instead of force-feeding data into very limiting Category, Action, Label dimensions that you’ll never be able to analyze. And then you can easily find that data and report on it in actionable ways.
How does this work in practice?
Think about call to action buttons on your website.
In UA, you probably tracked them as follows:
- Action – Click
- Category – Button
- Label – Page Name – Button Text – Button Destination
That was a lot of data crammed into a single dimension, which made it almost inaccessible from an analysis standpoint.
In GA4, you can track page name, button text, button color, button destination, button size, and pretty much anything else you want in separate custom parameters that serve as dimensions (once you register them in GA4, that is).
Yes, it’s a little more work to set up this type of tracking, but it gives you a lot more power for analysis.
Explorations give you full insight into your data
Explorations are a game changer and crush any reporting tools from UA. You can find anything you want, including real page pathing reports that allow you to look at user journeys from start to finish.
Explorations take some time to get used to and are typically for more advanced users, but once you get in there, you’ll find everything you could ever want from a data perspective. They really let you explore!
Track mobile apps and your website together
With GA4, you can easily track websites and mobile apps in the same property while still analyzing the data separately for a more complete view at how users engage with all your owned platforms.
UA was a nightmare for tracking across devices or across properties. Now you can pull it all together so you can see how people are finding you, how they are accessing the app, and how the two components play together in the overall user journey. Pretty cool stuff!
Engagement rate is a more helpful metric
In a controversial move, GA4 killed off bounce rate and introduced engagement rate (and then brought back bounce rate when enough people complained). I say let bounce rate die! Engagement rate is a much better metric than bounce rate, and it’s a lot easier to adjust. This gives you meaningful data regarding the effectiveness of your website rather than a confusing vanity metric that led to a lot of poor decisions.
By default, engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that last more than 10 seconds, view more than one page, or complete a key event. You can adjust the time up to 60 seconds, and you can set any key events you want. With bounce rate, people could be on your page for 10 minutes, read all your content, but still count as a bounce. That’s not very helpful for making decisions!
Unlimited key events instead of limited goals
GA4 doesn’t rely on a limited number of goals that are tied to Goal IDs that can never be deleted. Instead, you can set up all the key events you want, and you can track them once or more than once per session to give a more accurate conversion rate based on your website’s specific needs.
Google Analytics 4 isn’t perfect. Here’s where it doesn’t shine.
If you’re thinking this is just a GA4 fanboy post, you’re wrong. GA4 is not a perfect system, and I wonder how much user testing they really did before launching it.
Here are four things that suck about GA4:
- Some of the auto events are garbage, like the form submission event. Turn this off or you’ll have noisy and bad data.
- It’s not as easy to find things in the standard reports (although I think Explorations more than make up for this).
- The data lag is a lot longer. Good luck trying to see any data from today. Chances are, today’s report is always going to be blank for you. And the real-time report leaves a lot to be desired.
- There are severe limitations regarding data that’s over 14 months old, which primarily impacts those awesome Explorations I’ve been talking about. But, let’s be honest here. Most of the time you don’t need to explore data that’s over 14 months old.
Oh, and one more thing: the training materials are abysmal and the certification course is a complete joke! It’s like Google threw it together in an hour because they needed something.
There is hope for Google Analytics 4 and you
I’ve already made it clear that I prefer GA4 in many ways, even if it isn’t perfect.
Here’s the thing: no matter how much you liked Universal Analytics, it’s gone. GA4 might not be your ideal product to replace it, but I promise it tracks everything you need to run your website effectively.
Remember when you first started using Universal Analytics? It wasn’t easy to use. It was new. You fumbled through it to get the data you wanted. Now we’re doing that again.
If you aren’t happy with GA4, then I suspect there is one of two problems:
- It’s not set up correctly.
- You haven’t worked inside the platform enough.
If you need help setting it up, shoot me a message. I have configured over 100 GA4 accounts properly to deliver all the data needed for everyone from a solo blogger to a $1B business (seriously, it works for businesses doing over $1 billion in annual revenue).
If I can’t convince you to love GA4, then no one can. But you have to be willing to try.
