What is GA4?

GA4 is an update to the current Universal Analytics that collects website and app data to gain more insight into the traffic on a website or app. Basically, it is: GA4 helps you turn your website traffic data into better insights. With new features like Machine Learning and a completely new way to measure, GA4 is a must-have and above all an added feature to optimize your online marketing.

GA4 functions:

• Better protection of personal data: in GA4, cookies are no longer required, users remain completely anonymous and IP addresses are not stored;
• Redesigned reports: provide an even more complete picture of visitor behavior on your website;
• Directly measure interactions without additional required code or Google Tag Manager tags;
• Appdata available;
• Notifications and predictions on audience behavior: thanks to Machine Learning, GA4 provides notifications when there are significant changes in the data and predicts which audiences are more likely to make a conversion.

Why is GA4 important for businesses?

GA4 is important because it helps to better understand how users behave on a website. This can help improve the user experience and customize the website or app to better suit the user's needs. It can also help identify problems with the website or app and actions to resolve them. Moreover, GA4 can help businesses make data-driven decisions and measure the effectiveness of their online marketing efforts.

In short, GA4 is a valuable tool that helps companies better understand user behavior on their website or app and improve online performance.

A real-life example: a campground advertises in Google Ads and sends out a newsletter every month. The owner of the campsite invests a lot in Google Ads, because this brings a lot of visitors to the website. He sometimes wants to skip the monthly emails, as he doesn't feel they do much anyway. Thanks to the measurements of Google Analytics, we see that the conversions of the emails are much higher than the conversion of Google Ads. In short, email marketing is apparently much more lucrative than Google Ads, despite the many visitors the Ads bring in. Thanks to the measurements of Google Analytics, we are so optimally deploying the marketing budgets.

Switching from Universal Analytics to GA4

Because the current version of Google Analytics will no longer have measurements as of July 2023, it is important to set up a GA4 prop as soon as possible. Especially if you want to start comparing data, this is important. But at the same time, switching from Universal Analytics to GA4 is a good way to take advantage of Google Analytics' new and improved features.

In Tommy Booking Support, we have built in a data layer that will measure all your bookings with a little modification to Tommy. To do this, in the Tommy installation help you add the GA4 Measurement ID as per the instructions and of course the code then needs to be modified on the website itself.

Of course, we are happy to help you with this and ensure that GA4 is set up correctly. Please contact one of our specialists for more information. You will also receive a short GA4 manual explaining where to find the most relevant data in GA4.