The Old Google Analytics Is Being Retired. What Can You Expect From GA4?

The market is in turmoil once again, as Google has announced its definitive, new update! 

There is lots of news in the media that is causing a shock to the data market, announcing that Google’s Universal Analytics or GA3, as many know it, will stop working in 2023, to be replaced by GA4.

I feel like I will be representing many of my colleagues when I say that mixing words like changes, update, or new parameters with the name of Google is scary, and it gives me goosebumps!

This is because, despite the fact that Google is always announcing a change in its way of understanding and disseminating information, it takes us out of our comfort zone and constantly forces us to learn new methods that involve changing our communication strategies.

And in this same dynamic, the tax migration to GA4 impacts us because it means that we must adapt to Google again and that is why digital professionals are expressing their feelings about it on the web.

Are you also worried or afraid of what is to come? First, I invite you to subscribe to our interactive newsletter. Every Friday we send you the main Marketing and Content trends directly to your email – and we will certainly keep you updated on any changes, not just from Google, but from everything that impacts your Marketing strategies.

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Now, let’s find out a little more about what this great new alteration of Google is all about.

Are we saying goodbye to Universal Analytics?

It is not that radical yet, and it is not the first time that changes have occurred in Google Analytics. 

It is not for nothing that the name of the new version is GA4 and the one we use, for most of us, is GA3. This means that a version 2 and 1 of Google Analytics already existed and that big changes in the tool are not new. 

Not to mention that every year, technology advances faster, and intelligence, both human and artificial, accompany these levels of development and new paradigms.

Despite the previous versions 2 and 1, I am too young in the labor market to be able to tell you about the impacts that the implementation of the current version GA3 or Universal Analytics (UA) brought in 2012, replacing GA2 or Classic Analytics (CA); which still works for a few companies, despite the years gone by. 

Let’s move on then, to better understand these changes that afflict the market today. 

But before that, I want to share with you that, on behalf of Rock Content, what we feel most is that this situation is the great privilege of being able to live in a time of inflection for Google, in which now all professionals in the digital market must implement a new organizational structure, analysis, and compilation of information, to receive the GA4 version with open arms and take full advantage of the data. 

Have you already imagined the number of robust communication strategies that will come out of the new implementation of GA? Because we have!

What are the changes that GA4 brings to the market?

Without going into the depths of the subject, because for that we will prepare a complete content, I can tell you that GA4 was created in order to rethink the formulas in which data is arranged without the use of cookies. 

This idea arises from the reputation damage that Google was suffering from when the controversial relationship between the tracking of user information and the privacy problems generated, mainly, by Third-Party-Cookies.

In addition to the problems and keeping in mind more positive arguments, GA4 was created to bring new proposals to the current information age, in which platforms seek to integrate with greater agility and where both Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have taken such relevance. This ceased to be just technologies and transcended to a strategic level of communication, which is impossible to avoid.

And this is what GA4 is promising to deliver.

How will GA4 affect digital marketing strategies?

Today, Marketing professionals work based on performance metrics that tell us whether we are achieving our communication and sales opportunity generation goals.

From this, think of GA4 as a tool capable of alerting us, through notifications, about important changes in the trends of our KPIs. 

The latter, for its part, moves us away from the traditional planning of objectives based on the simple calculation of visits to a website, for example, and brings us closer to complete measurement of the information with which we can deliver specific communications for each market of our interest.

Only the latter, for us at Rock Content who work with international markets, is simply pure gold.

How does Rock Content see the changes to GA4?

Better late than never.

I confess that as the current leader of the top three Rock Content blogs for the United States, Brazil, and Mexico, it’s only today that I came to really concern myself with the system update. 

Well, let’s say that the day-to-day absorbed us as a team, to respond first to the emergencies of recent times. Despite this, I like the idea that GA4 has now become a new priority for the Rock Content team, and we can get to know the tool and reconstruct the information before the change is an inevitable reality.

If I’ve learned anything from working with Google and its various tools, it’s that nothing is forever. And that, as digital communication professionals, flexibility must be the first quality that accompanies us.

That’s why, in addition to working hard on the SEO strategies of Rock Content blogs, we also dedicate ourselves to weekly bringing the main changes and trends in Marketing, business, sales, and content in our newsletter (you can check the latest issue and subscribe here).

It is useless to generate attachments to the old. From the past, it is only better to collect the learning to be able to assume what follows. And as I have repeatedly mentioned, what is coming with GA4 is a new analysis tool capable of taking our knowledge of the market to another level.

As digital professionals, we are holders of the great fourth world power: communication; and making us aware that the changes that will be implemented serve to optimize our resources and protect us more as natural persons. GA4 is simply a tool that will help us become ethical with our strategies and that is priceless.

So the initial invitation here is for us to learn how to learn. We are one year away from seeing the new GA4 version become the main property of Google Analytics, therefore, we must hurry to make the migration, not for fear of losing the data, but because it is necessary for our business health and because simply the Technology advances with or without us. 

So it better be with us. 😉

What have we learned in Rock Content with Google Analytics?

There isn’t a day that Rock Content doesn’t go into Google Analytics. 

And to tell the truth, whoever works with digital channels, at the very least, using the tool should be the first and last thing to do on a working day.

At Rock Content we have several extremely important and interesting data analysis tools, but the amount of information in real-time that GA gives us cannot be compared to the rest of the tools.

We have built our Digital Marketing success based on GA graphs. Our strategies have been consolidated at the same time that we have learned to interpret the data. And, finally, the numbers that GA keeps on our domains tell the stories that we have lived through at Rock Content over our 9 years in the market.

When I say stories, it is not a romanticized metaphor for Google Analytics, but rather a reality that with the metrics that it has given us during this time, we have been able to reconstruct the decisions that we as a company made or did not make. This is true even if we were not the collaborators who defined the paths in the past.

Analytics has already pointed out how we survived domain, hosting, and layout migrations in previous years.

It also tells us how a strategy changed in terms of increasing or decreasing content production, and even when our work teams suffered alterations or rotations.

GA has taught us about behaviors, not only of independent users but also of countries and nations with their customs and thirst for information. It has reminded us, day by day, how the whole world interprets a subject differently and even more beautifully, how it makes use of information to solve its personal problems.

Analytics is a tool that helps us not only to look back at the past to reconstruct and understand it but also to build the future from it and train us in predicting behaviors, which ultimately translate into strategies.

Being such a complete tool, we are simply placing all of our expectations on GA4 to take our next big step.

What do we in Rock Content expect from the change of GA4?

In conclusion, Google Analytics, in all its versions, has been part of the construction of Rock Content’s history. Therefore, if Google insisted today on the implementation of its latest GA4 version, it is because great events are yet to come to the digital and data market.

As much as change causes us terror at Rock Content, we can’t wait to continue participating in this new paradigm of information. 

With the promise of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence that GA4 brings, the more time we take to implement the version, the more time the property will also take to learn and show us insights about the market, human behaviors, and about our businesses. Tomorrow it will be too late..

And here between us; today we are talking about the GA4 as the final version, but I am sure that soon we will be meeting again through this medium to talk about the arrival of a GA5. Because… why not?

We hope, therefore, to pass this first phase of migration in order to be able to bring new reflections on Google Analytics, so that in the future we can affectionately remember the migratory feat that digital professionals had to experience en masse in the middle of 2022.

Stay tuned to Rock Content’s articles. We are going to bring this topic to you many more times, in order to help you migrate to Google Analytics 4 safely. To not miss anything, please, subscribe to The Beat, our interactive newsletter released every Friday.