Though the switch to GA4 may have come with growing pains, there are some surprisingly insightful features worth the hassle. In fact, your attribution strategy may become outdated unless these new features are leveraged correctly.
Here are GA4’s top three new features that will make a meaningful impact in your analytics:
Customize Data Capture and Reporting
Compared to its predecessor, GA4 offers enhanced customizability for optimizing data capture and reports. Events (a.k.a. possible conversions) can be defined, modified, and even turned on or off via Events Page under Admin. This enables you to more precisely determine and track which user interactions matter most to your business. For example, now a conversion can more easily be defined as a user having scrolled 85% of a landing page–a positive signal of content consumption.
This same degree of flexibility is extended to your reports; clicking the Customize button on any report allows you to restructure the report’s available metrics and dimensions to your liking. You could even customize reports to mimic UA familiarity, though we recommend including GA4’s new engagement metrics in the mix.
Draw Deeper Insights with Engagement Metrics
GA4’s event-driven data model introduces nearly 100 metrics centered on drawing deeper insights from user engagement. Unless your brand relies on impulse purchases for a steady cash flow, the Engaged Sessions Per User metric should be prioritized in your attribution strategy. This is because it allows you to understand if your Returning Users–another noteworthy metric–are ripening for conversion as they revisit your website. Since customer journeys typically take the form of awareness, to consideration, to purchase, Engaged Sessions Per User is a good signal for determining if customers are moving from awareness to consideration.
We recommend exploring all of GA4’s new engagement metrics to determine which one’s will reshape your attribution strategy and add deeper insights about consumer behavior.
Discover High-Value Audiences with Predictive Metrics
Equipped with machine learning capabilities, GA4 introduces three predictive metrics (Purchase Probability, Churn Probability, and Predicted Revenue) that can identify the likelihood of a certain consumer behavior within the next 7 to 28 days. By segmenting audiences based on predicted behaviors, your ad spend can then be maximized on users that fit your marketing agenda.
For example, if your brand is focused on securing purchases from interested customers, you can leverage Purchase Probability to create a segmentation of users that will likely purchase in the next 7 days. You can then target this audience with personalized ads (i.e. promos or offers) that can cement their interest and secure their likelihood of purchase. You can build predictive audiences by navigating to Admin > Audiences > New Audience > Predictive and then selecting which type of audience you’d like to build.
Though GA4 boasts a wide selection of new features and metrics, none of it matters unless it can help deliver bottom-line outcomes. Fortunately, the tools it provides allows for a much cleaner attribution strategy–one that can help you make better data-driven decisions for transforming your digital ecosystem into a profitable economy.