The Google Analytics 4 Podcast

Google Analytics 4 is not new - when count in the "Web + App property" which basically was a v0.8 - it's out for years. But rollout was weird, a long time essential features were missing. Which is ok, if your product is in beta. But Google pushed the 4 version early as the recommended version and basically confused everyone. So we started to ignore it a little bit - still watched the news, when new features arrived but not really invested into it.But now it's ready - the essential features are there and a bunch of new ones too. So 2022 is GA4 year - let's do it.

Really, Google Analytics is 16 years old. Yes, it is. With 16 in most cultures you can already do a lot of things. Driving a car, vote, drink alcohol (often not a great idea), starting a job. So, you can start to call yourself mature (at least a little bit). Google Analytics is a mature software. But why is this software doing such a huge remodelling like they do it now with Google Analytics 4. History can help us to understand it better. It's also the history of web analytics (and app analytics). Which helps us to understand why specific data models are different (pageviews vs events). And how much effort went into the development of analytics solutions as we know them today. For Google Analytics it's the history of a data model which was great for the web 1.0 world. And also a history of a data model that was build for the new app-driven world and how both models are merged to become Google Analytics 4. Sounds like a blockbuster? Trust me it is one.

Data models are just something for real data nerds?Not this time. For Google Analytics 4 understanding the data model is important for everyone.Why?Because moving from Google Analytics Universal to Google Analytics 4 is basically moving to a new analytics service. It’s not an incremental update but a completely new setup.The major change is the data model.That is why I did a podcast episode about the data model change. Link in the comment.In GA4 we have now, what we know already from Firebase, Amplitude or Mixpanel: an event & user (unique identifier) based model.What does that mean?First of all the user (or account, or device) becomes more important because it replaces the good old session (mostly) - so adding user attributes is a good idea because all events inherit them (example: has_subscribed_to_newsletter, current_plan).Then events become first class citizens and are pushing the good old pageviews to second class (a pageview is just a specific event). And now we can use the more organic model of event name and event attributes. No more data stuffing in the event label dimension.But GA4 keeps some weird stuff around events:- To see the attributes in the reports you have to assign them to custom dimensions - (honestly, this drives me crazy)- why did they not call it properties like everyone else does. No in Ga4 they are called attributes…So how does it change. In most cases not so much. Here is a simple example:We have a newsletter subscribe page, where a user can subscribe to a newsletter and select some topics she likesIn Universal analytics we would have implemented it like this:Category: NewsletterAction: subscribedLabel: topic 1, topic 2In GA4 it would be this:Event name: newsletter_subscribednewsletter_topics: topic1, topic2Not so much different but much clearer at least when it comes to the topics.