Have you seen this message from Google Analytics in your inbox?
We have been almost daily since last year!
Every marketer's lifeblood is Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console. If you have a website, you should care about its performance, which means Google Analytics should be one of your most frequently used tools. With tech, things are always changing. Here's another change you'll have to deal with.
The next-generation measurement solution, Google Analytics 4, is replacing Universal Analytics. On July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new data. This means that any Universal Analytics data that you're using in Google Ads campaigns will start to degrade and your ad performance may be impacted.
What does that mean for you if you're not running ads?
Google Analytics provides critical insights to how your visitors are interacting with your website and your brand online. If you're not looking at this data, you should be. More importantly, if you don't complete the new setup, you may not get all the invaluable insights. Here's a deeper dive.
If you're doing any SEO work or producing content in blogs, you may lose the ability to see the impact.
I know, I know, all this tech is confusing. THE TECH TRAUMA IS A REAL THING! But remember, your website is an asset of your business, you have to maintain it like you do your vehicles!
What insights can you gain from Analytics?
- Know where visitors are coming from- location, platforms
- Our personal favorite on the new G4: GA4 has a new tool called Life Cycle that reports on four crucial metrics: Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention. This feature shifts the focus from individual sessions to the complete customer experience.
- What pages are visited most, what pages they bounce off.
- Device Tech- you'll want to know if they are on mobile or desktop. Why? Mainly it dictates the layout of your content and more of a focus on responsive pages.
- How long they are staying on your site and what pages they are coming in at (entry points) If folks aren't staying 1-3 min on your site, you have some work to do. People bounce off in less than a minute for various reasons, but much of the time it's the site isn't doing it's job in convincing them to stay and click.
- It tracks visits from social media so GA is a fantastic tool to understand the impact of all your hard work doing social posts. If you don't share your website link on social media posts, you're missing out big time: on SEO juice and opportunity.
- CONVERSIONS!! Analytics has the ability to track form submissions, e-commerce purchases, abandon carts, and just about any other conversion you want to track. Your website is part of your marketing and sales team, it should be assisting in lead generation and sales (even when you're sleeping!)
- Plus, just a whole lot more...
**Google will be doing some automated migrations but it won't transfer everything. We strongly recommend that you follow the step-by-step guide to make the switch to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible.**
If you are under a maintenance agreement with us, we'll take care of this for you. If not, we can still take care of this for you. Just email workbeaops@gmail.com with your request.
