I will try to explain the most common GA4 problems here. I have described in detail that Google Analytics Universal (GA3) is dying out and it is time to act. Since July 2023, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will be the only option for data collection with Google Analytics. After June 30, 2024, Universal Analytics data can no longer be accessed. We offer export services until June 20, 2024! But there are issues with GA4, at least for those of us who have used and loved Universal Analytics (UA).
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And now for the big GA4 problems! The first problem is the removal of some key metrics that many have relied on.
GA4 Problem #1 - "Missing" metrics
GA4 has a completely different data model compared to GA3 (UA). Instead of being based on sessions and page views like Universal Analytics, the GA4 measurement model is based on events. As the data is collected and processed in a different way, some once familiar metrics have now disappeared. Chief among these are average session duration and bounce rate. Personally, I've never been a big fan of average session duration (mostly because it doesn't show what most people think it does), but bounce rate is a big loss. Being able to look at landing pages based on lowest and highest bounce rates is a great way for digital marketers to understand which pages are performing best and which need to be reworked to better address user needs. Instead, GA4 offers a new metric called "engaged sessions".
What is an "engaged session" in GA4?
According to Google, an "engaged session" is a "session that lasted 10 seconds or longer or had 1 or more conversion events or 2 or more page or screen views. It's not an entirely useless metric, but it's often far less specific than the good old bounce rate, depending on the website. You can see this "Engaged Sessions" metric in the GA4 Traffic Acquisition report in the screenshot below. You can also see related new metrics such as "Average time spent per session" and "Dwell rate". Again, these aren't useless or bad metrics, I'd just like to swap them out for bounce rate so I can compare them to historical benchmarks.
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Why it's a problem
For some people, different metrics are not a problem. For example, if you don't miss the bounce rate, you probably belong to this category. However, for some of us, it's convenient to use all the "normal" metrics that have always been available in Google Analytics. Without this functionality, GA generally becomes less user-friendly. And if bounce rate has been one of the most important metrics for your business, you simply need to find a new way to identify your best and worst performing pages.
What to do?
Well, there are two main options.
- 1. wait and see what happens. GA4 is still under development and new improvements are released regularly. It is possible that some of these old favorites from UA will be introduced in GA4. From what I understand, there will be a bounce rate metric in GA4 based on the percentage of unengaged sessions (i.e. a 20% engaged session rate equals an 80% bounce rate). This will be helpful, but is still not perfect as a benchmark as historical bounce rates are based on a different calculation.
- 2. get used to using the new metrics in GA4, such as "engaged sessions", to replace the old bounce rate!
Measure user engagement instead of bounce rate
The newly introduced engagement rate is intended to give users a more precise impression of how visitors interact with a website. The engagement rate results from the ratio of "engaged sessions" to the total number of sessions on a website. This metric should essentially answer the same question as the bounce rate previously in Google Universal Analytics and at the same time eliminate the decisive disadvantages of the bounce rate. As written above: "engaged sessions" in the new metric are all sessions that either last longer than 10 seconds or contain a conversion event or had more than one screen or pageview. Long visits to a website that do not result in a click to another page, as described above, are therefore no longer considered "unengaged" sessions and are therefore not included negatively in the measurement of user engagement on a website. This gives Google Analytics 4 users a more accurate picture of whether their website contains the content users are looking for and how high user engagement with their website is.
Still measuring the bounce rate - is that possible?
If you want to measure your bounce rate despite the disadvantages of the bounce rate and available alternatives in Google Analytics 4, then this option is still available, even if Google Analytics 4 no longer shows the bounce rate directly. You can reproduce the old bounce rate metric by using Google BigQuery. With the figures and information contained therein, the bounce rate can be calculated approximately. However, an exact mapping of the previous values and a corresponding comparison with reference values can be time-consuming and only partially effective.
What is the better metric?
As described, the engagement rate provides a more accurate picture of how good the user engagement on a website is. In addition, the user engagement rate is available via the interface in Google Analytics 4. Nevertheless, the bounce rate is a well-known metric due to its many years of use. Many stakeholders may therefore still expect to see the bounce rate in reports. In this case, you can still display the bounce rate as described above. Nevertheless, we recommend using the engagement rate instead of the bounce rate in the future in order to be able to map and measure the user engagement of a website.
GA4 Problem #2 - "Missing" standard reports
Not only are some of the metrics different, but many of the familiar Universal Analytics reports are not available in GA4. As far as we can tell, a large part of the reason is due to the development philosophy. Universal Analytics has been developed over time as a comprehensive suite of pre-built reports that can be used immediately to analyze online performance. GA4, on the other hand, is based on a different measurement methodology and serves more as a tool for collecting lots of data, with much of the analysis taking place outside of the platform (e.g. Big Query). The GA4 reports that are available are limited and sometimes bulky. Instead, many users create their GA4 reports in Data Studio or export their data to BigQuery for further analysis. When we look at the reporting options for traffic acquisition between UA and GA4, the difference is particularly clear.
Acquisition reports in Universal Analytics (GA3)
In UA, there are no less than 30 standard reports in the Acquisition Reports section. Subtracting the 11 specific to Google Ads still leaves a large number of useful reports that we can use. They are highlighted in the blue box below. Traffic acquisition reports are particularly useful for understanding how different traffic sources are performing in terms of total sessions on the site and (most importantly) how effective they each are at increasing conversions. One of my personal favorites is the Source/Medium report. You can see it highlighted in yellow in the image below. This report is the place to go if you want to understand the relative performance of different traffic "sources" (the platform sending the traffic) and "mediums" (the type of traffic). Here are some examples. - google / organic (traffic from Google organic search) - bing / organic (traffic from Bing organic search) - google / cpc (paid Google Ads traffic) - facebook.com / referral Thanks to this comprehensive range of traffic reporting options, Universal Analytics is out-of-the-box for many users.
Acquisition reports in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
If we look at the same reporting area in GA4, we initially only have 3 acquisition reports available. You can see them highlighted below.
Why is it a problem?
Some of us may be happy that we only have 10% of the display options available here. And I agree that UA's 30 might be too much for some. However, I personally feel that these 3 can't provide nearly the same level of useful analytical insights as Universal Analytics. There just aren't enough of them to really get a full picture of what's happening on a website. The good news is that we can customize our reports to mitigate this GA4 problem somewhat.
What to do to create reports?
As mentioned earlier, GA4 can be customized. This is the #1 option you have. Customize GA4's built-in reports to add additional features that you were missing in UA. Below are some links & video links you can use to rebuild the Landing Pages report and others in GA4 (NOTE: Not all tips will work over time as GA4 is a work in progress even without beta). You can also integrate Google Search Console data into GA4 (a "Domain Property" must now be verified in the GSC!) And you can create a campaign traffic report (for traffic that is tagged with UTM parameters - by the way, there is also an advanced UTM-buidling tool) It's a little extra work, but you can replicate some of UA's old favorites reasonably well, if useful.
GA4 Problem #3 - Some basic conversion tracking is more difficult in GA4
In some ways, GA4 makes custom tracking easier than UA. Events like clicks on external links and scrolls (note: default scrolls are 90% - we still can't avoid measuring scrolling more accurately with Google Tag Manager) can be tracked quite easily on the new platform, whereas the same type of tracking in UA requires setting up tags and triggers in Google Tag Manager. But one of the most basic and important conversion actions - successfully submitting a contact form - is much more complex in GA4.
Setting up conversions in Universal Analytics (GA3)
In Universal Analytics, there are 4 types of goals (conversions) that you can create:
- 1. session duration
- 2. pages/session
- 3. goal
- 4. event / event
The first two can be set up quickly and easily in GA, but are only of limited use. It may be interesting to see how many visitors view 3 or more pages during their session, but this doesn't usually help you understand why they are buying or filling out your contact form. However, the goal is quick to create in GA3 and can be very helpful. For example, you could track visits to a contact page as an important conversion measure for someone looking for ways to get in touch. Or you could track visits to a "thank you" page where a visitor automatically lands after submitting a form. These goals can be created in UA within 30 seconds and can be very effective. Event goals are also very effective, but they are more complicated to create. To create an event goal, you'll need the help of Google Tag Manager to track "events" like button clicks, downloads, and scrolls that don't cause a new page view.
An important note about thank you pages for tracking
It's worth noting that some people don't like tracking thank you pages for tracking forms (including us). There can be some drawbacks, particularly in terms of data integrity, as thank you pages can be prone to double counting. There are also other ways to track submitted forms than thank you pages. The tracking method often depends on the type of form you use and how it works. Contact Form 7 (the most downloaded form plugin for WordPress) works differently than a Typo3 form.
Setting up conversions in GA4
Unlike UA, the data model in GA4 is not based on sessions and page views. This means that 3 of the 4 "easy" conversions to create no longer exist in UA. Calculated metrics such as pages/session and session duration simply do not exist in GA4, and a goal based on the view of a specific page is now a complex endeavor. This is not a big problem for the session duration and pages/session goal types, but the lack of simple goals is a loss. Since the data in GA4 is processed as different types of events, we only have conversions based on event data. And that usually means we need to enlist the help of Google Tag Manager. We think Google Tag Manager (GTM) is an incredible tool. But it's also true that not everyone can get to grips with it. If this applies to you, you won't like setting up these types of conversions with GA4.
Why setting up conversions is a challenge
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, there are other types of data that are much easier to set up than UA. Some examples are scroll tracking, tracking clicks on external links and tracking downloads. Still, the fact remains that the loss of the "destination" feature will be an obstacle for some people who want to easily track visits to high-value pages. For many websites, tracking a successful form submission is the most important conversion action of all. And that's a much more involved process now. You can't create goals in GA4, but you can watch tutorials to configure GA4 to track form submissions. You will definitely need Google Tag Manager to create a page view trigger. You then create a GA4 event tag that you link to the trigger. When you create this tag, you can create additional "event parameters" to add additional context to event data. After testing in GTM, you can publish your tag and trigger so that this data can flow into GA4. You will then need to register all event parameters as custom dimensions in GA4 so that this data is available to you in your reports.
#4 - It remains to be seen whether the EU's privacy concerns about Google will go away
It's no surprise that data privacy is a major issue in the world of digital marketing and in the world at large. This is perhaps best illustrated by the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), which came into force in the European Union on May 25, 2018. This legislation has brought some European countries into conflict with Google (especially Google Analytics). And you can read this subtext in the GA4 story.
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What does Google say?
In its March 16 press release, Google explains that Universal Analytics was based on a methodology that is "rapidly becoming obsolete". And it is true that GA4 introduces a number of improvements and upgrades compared to its predecessor. It's also true that Universal Analytics has run afoul of some governments over the issue of data privacy. In the same press release, Google explains what UA and GA4 privacy is all about.
And while Universal Analytics offers a variety of privacy controls, Google Analytics 4 focuses on privacy to provide a better experience for both our customers and their users. It helps organizations meet evolving requirements and user expectations with more comprehensive and granular controls for data collection and use. Importantly, Google Analytics 4 will no longer store IP addresses. These solutions and controls are particularly necessary in today's international privacy landscape, where users increasingly expect more privacy and control over their data.
According to Google, GA4 is "privacy at its core". So it's possible that the platform was developed to resolve potential conflicts with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and get Google out of any privacy-related trouble with the EU. But that's a question that still needs to be clarified. And I have yet to see any documentation from Google outlining the specific implementation steps that will ensure 100% GDPR compliance. It remains exciting and Oplayo will keep you up to date.