As the transition window begins to close in on Universal Analytics (UA), many businesses are gearing up for the changeover and need help configuring Google Analytics 4.

Google’s Universal Analytics will officially be retired in less than 3 months’ time and it is now crucial for businesses to understand the benefits and challenges that the changeover to GA4 will bring.

While there are still improvements to GA4 being rolled out, GA4 is a completely different platform, that takes a different approach to data collection and reporting. Many of our clients need help configuring Google Analytics 4, as it is a much more complex platform. Event tracking in Google Analytics 4 for example requires a different approach.

Google Analytics 4 Event Tracking Tips from FCDM

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), conversions are built from Events. GA4 Conversion implementation will be different if you are accustomed to the standard conversion configurations in Universal Analytics.

While your new GA4 property will pick up some Events, it won’t find everything that you need to complete GA4 configuration correctly. Taking a thank you page from a contact form as an example, this may not have been collected as an Event, so you will need to create a Custom Event in GA4 to start collecting this data.

Remember too that GA4 is much slower to process the data in the reports. It can take time (up to 24 hours) for Custom Events to populate in the ‘All Events’ report. While the Realtime report will render the event hits within a few minutes after testing, its important to test your events and check Realtime to ensure your configuration is correct.

Need Help Configuring Google Analytics 4? FCDM can help you!

If you need help configuring Google Analytics 4, why not get in touch with our expert digital marketing team today! We can help you with everything from setting up Event Tracking to eCommerce Tracking for GA4 and much more!