You’re missing a lot of opportunities if you don’t have analytics in your website.
It’s a gold mine: knowing how people find you online and engage with your content can help you build and adjust your game plan.
The new update of Google Analytics (GA4) is an exciting development in the world of analytics.
In this blogpost, we’ll walk you through some of the really good reasons why you need to start using GA4.
1. Identify traffic sources
GA4 offers a better view of your traffic sources, so you can identify channels you need to optimise or discontinue.
For example, if you are advertising on a platform but you can’t see traffic from that source, your money might be diverted elsewhere.
Likewise, if you are receiving more traffic from short-form, visual content such as Instagram, then you may need to adjust your website to match customer demographics.
In GA4, you can break down channels into further data such as user steps that can provide you more powerful insight on how people find you online.
Understanding your traffic sources will help you adjust your content so your visitors will be more enticed to continue the journey.
2. Better funnel visualisation
The improved pathways in GA4 will allow you to better visualise the customer journey and understand the flow of your website or app visitors.
This feature will help you understand how your visitors get to final conversion points, so you can gain better assessment on how you can optimise your channels.
It is now even possible to work in reverse from a conversion point and develop the touchpoints this way.
3. Increase sales by identifying ‘drop off’ points
With better funnel visualisation, you can easily understand where your visitors are dropping off or points where your customers leave your website without taking a desired action (signing up, purchasing, booking a call, etc).
But remember, not every visitor will end up completing the journey. With a visual funnel you can create in GA4, you can now see the percentage of your visitors that are dropping off on each step and understand areas you need to improve.
In GA4, the funnel is visualised as a series of blue bars that signify people who have viewed that page.
Under each bar, you can see the percent of visitors that dropped off on that specific step. You need to improve the bar with the largest drop off.
For example, if people are dropping off from a specific service page, then maybe you need to revisit that page and assess how you can improve it based on the desired outcome.
Add a video, edit the copy, add a few pictures or charts, or anything that can help your visitor take a desired action.
Improving your pages will push more users to complete the journey to a sale. Just a small percentage of improvement at every stage can make a considerable difference to your bottomline.
4. Retarget visitors who dropped off
GA4 is powerful enough to help you identify which group of visitors haven’t completed through your funnel.
With this powerful insight, you can retarget those visitors and encourage them to continue the journey.
You may integrate GA4 with Google Ads so you can target specific segments with an enticing offer.
5. More available measurements
In Universal Analytics, you can just track basic events automatically, and other areas should be setup manually within Analytics or via Google Tag Manager (GTM).
In fact, in the current version of Analytics, the measurements are just for basic events that can be super complicated and super fast, especially for untrained personnel (read: non-techy entrepreneurs).
Even if you still need to set up custom events to maximise the capabilities of GA4, it does have more available measurements such as website searches, link clicks, outbound links, and even scrolling.
So you or your marketing team can check more events without the need to hire a developer to help you set custom events.
GA4 is a bit of a relief if you are running a website and a mobile app. Previously, you need to use Google Analytics for your website, and Firebase for app analytics. Now you can do it all together in one place.
Finally, the simplified custom reports now make it easier to select segments to work with and then supplement with metrics and dimensions.
While it is not a major overhaul of custom reporting, the interface is now easier to use.
GA4 is a Wake-Up Call for Small Business Websites
Google has already rolled out the new version, so it is now available to be installed in your website.
Meanwhile, if your website is still on Universal Analytics, take note that Google will stop processing new data on 1 July 2023.
While you still have enough time to set up your GA4 properties, early adoption will enable your digital properties to begin tracking the metrics that will help you in business decisions.
In just a few months, GA4 will be the standard version, so the earlier you set it up, the faster you can become familiar with the interface and capabilities of the platform.
GA4 is easier and slightly more powerful than GA. Meaning it is lowering the barrier for marketers to make use of their marketing data.
But don’t just switch right over from GA to GA4. Turn both at the same time and see which insights and interface you prefer.
But keep in mind that GA4 is where Google is spending their time, energy and money improving
So don’t be surprised if GA4 begins leaving the old analytics in the dust.
WebBuzz Can Help You Make Sense of GA4
Maybe you are so busy taking care of other aspects of your business or you don’t have an in-house team who can handle the configuration.
At WebBuzz, we use data for pretty much everything – but especially to inform campaign strategy. We make analytics interesting for clients, by creatively interpreting the data to develop actions that will turbo-charge the marketing plan.
Our team of digital marketing experts can help you set up Google Analytics. Whether your require a basic or advanced Google Analytics installation, we’ll get your digital campaigns optimised for data collection.
If you need to review your whole SEO efforts, WebBuzz has a team of experts ready for a chat.
Call us on 1300 41 00 81.
Regards,
Darren
