The new UI for GA4 is rolling out and one of the biggest features included is a customizable left-hand nav (for the first time ever)!
If you click on reports -> library you can customize it for all your users.
Also included are the new attribution modeling and pathing reports. What's new with these compared to Multi-Channel Funnels?
- include up to 50 touches (vs. 4 in MCF)
- include YouTube for the first time
- more segmentable (by page, custom dimension, etc)
The filter selector can be really challenging to use right now due to how it truncates text and has limited advanced search operators. Doesn't look like we can filter the default channel grouping dimension either.
A great starting point, just needs a few small updates!
Lastly, GA4 now has attribution settings in the property admin.
What's interesting about this is that it controls the default attribution model for all your standard reports AND that it can be changed (for the first time)!
GA has always forced us to use a last-click attribution model in all our standard reports and being able to change it has been one of the top feature requests. Once, more reporting attribution models get added, we can finally cross that off the list.
Also in the attribution settings is customizable lookback windows. 🥳
Here is the primary challenge you need to be aware of if you use Google Signals in Google Analytics 4 for identity.
You could be missing key conversions/events when using your reports.
Here is an example: we have 7 conversions shown within the last 30 days.
Some of our most essential conversions, like contact form submissions, are unavailable until we change our date range to a long enough time (in this example minimum of 90 days).
Here we have 3 of our conversions that are missing when reporting the last 30 days
This is what privacy/data thresholding is. To protect Google's device graph data, it hides/drops rows with low volumes, so you can't identify individual users. You can read more on this: support.google.com/analytics/answ…
When implementing Google Analytics 4, you'll want to avoid cardinality at all costs.
What is cardinality and why should you care?
In GA3, cardinality generally only occurred if you pulled a report where the dimensions you used had more than 50,000 unique names.
In GA4, it works very differently. If you have dimensions with lots of unique values, it can cause EVERY dimension to be aggregated.
This example highlights this. There are only ~60 possible combinations of operating system and default channel grouping, yet this report is severely aggregated..
Here are 10 of my favorite things you can do with Google Analytics 4 that you could never do with Universal.
1. Audience Conversions - In GA3, you could only have conversions based on a page or event. In GA4, you can have audience-based conversions.
2. Elapsed Time - GA3 did a terrible job at measuring time. It only could measure time per page, session, and user, and it never worked well.
GA4 rebuilt time, so you can now measure the time between interactions. Build any funnel you want and easily see the exact time it takes
3. Funnels - GA3 didn't have funnels that you'd ever want to show another human. The enterprise funnels that were only in GA360 are now available for everyone.