{"id":24976,"date":"2022-08-10T11:52:48","date_gmt":"2022-08-10T18:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/?p=24976"},"modified":"2024-01-18T16:24:51","modified_gmt":"2024-01-18T23:24:51","slug":"intro-to-google-analytics-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/intro-to-google-analytics-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Intro to Google Analytics 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a next-generation web analytics tool that helps you understand what users are doing on your website. You can see trends in user behavior, including how many visitors come to your site, how long they stay there, and how often they return. You can also see how they interact with different parts of your site, such as pages and forms. Whereas previous versions of Google Analytics focus the measurement on the desktop version of the site through a single data stream, Google Analytics 4 allows tracking across desktop and mobile applications from separate data streams and combines the data from multiple points. You can then use this information to optimize your site and mobile application for maximum effectiveness.<\/p>\n

V Digital Services is a Google Premium Partner, and as such, we are here to walk you through the updates to Google Analytics. Let us set up your GA4<\/a> or keep reading to learn more!<\/p>\n

What is Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics)?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Google Analytics is an online tool to measure your website’s performance. It helps you understand what users do on your site and how they interact with each other. You can utilize it to see how many people visit your site and how long they stay. You can also get an insight into your audience’s age, gender, location, and interests. You can even see if there are any problems with your site.<\/p>\n

For example, if you normally receive a significant number of leads on a lead form and they suddenly drop to zero, you can quickly determine that lead forms are broken and get them fixed. Or maybe you notice that people usually click a certain landing page link, but it’s reporting 0 sessions, alerting you that someone mistakenly removed the page right before a campaign. Google Analytics will tell you all of this, as well as help you find and fix these costly issues that occur.<\/p>\n

How does Google Analytics 3 work?<\/h3>\n

Google Analytics 3 collects information about visitors to websites using cookies. Cookies are small pieces of text stored on your device when you visit a website. Google Analytics uses cookies to collect anonymous traffic statistics to help website owners understand how visitors interact with their sites. These statistics include the pages visited, time spent on those pages, search terms entered, etc. Google Analytics lets website owners view detailed reports on how visitors engage with their site.<\/p>\n

Google Analytics 3 is a free service offered by Google that collects traffic statistics and reports on user behavior. It also provides insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and allows advertisers to track conversions and sales. It works by using small text files called “cookies” that are stored on your device when you visit a website. By tracking these files, Google can see what pages you visited, how long you spent on each page, and what you clicked on while visiting a particular page. You can choose to disable cookies if you wish, although doing so may affect your ability to use certain parts of the internet.<\/p>\n

Google Analytics 3 is installed on your site by adding a tracking code called analytics.js, which is placed in a file that allows it to fire across all your site pages, usually the header file. Once installed, Google Analytics 3 can generate a unique User ID for every user visiting your site. With every individual visiting your site having a unique User ID, Google Analytics can report on all activities occurring on the site coming from a single user. The combination of all these interactions is measured as a user session and can be used to measure how well people convert.<\/p>\n

Google Analytics 3 is limited in its ability to set up conversion points within the web application without using external tools and placement of external scripts. By default, you can set up simple conversions within Google Analytics, like firing a conversion:<\/p>\n