Whats's Google Analytics 4: how to use, new features (2024)

Marketing and SEO specialists place great importance on Google Analytics data because it is thanks to this information that user behavior can be analyzed very accurately. In this guide, we'll see how best to use GA4 new analytics tools to grow your site's audience or increase conversions and sales.

Google Analytics for your website

Google Analytics is an audience analysis tool with accurate and detailed statistics. The free version of Analytics allows you to track traffic sources, user behavior, and other important information. By analyzing this data, you can then tailor the website's content to meet user expectations. Based on this research, you can improve your content, provide a better user experience, establish better interaction between social networks and your website, optimize advertising campaigns (AdWords campaigns) and much more.

Use Google Analytics to increase website traffic

How do users navigate on your page? What pages do they visit and for how long? Analytics answer these questions and more by offering information on the average time users spend on each page, comparing landing and exit pages, and the paths users take to get to a site. Here you will find information about SEO, website links, social networks and advertising links (AdWords).

Increase your sales using Google Analytics data

Google Analytics allows you to understand how to optimize your website to increase conversion rates and drive purchases. In addition, it also offers a kind of free consultation that allows you to optimize the costs of advertising campaigns; digitally, via AdWords, on partner sites or via email (newsletter, etc.).

Set conversion goals in Google Analytics

Conversion goals vary from one professional site to another and can be in the form of a purchase, online quota, or contact. Google Analytics tracks this data in two forms: conversion goals (downloads, newsletter sign-ups) and e-commerce conversions, i.e. purchases.

Analyze the effectiveness of AdWords campaigns

Connecting Google AdWords and Google Analytics can give you many tools, including monitoring ad performance in Google Analytics, importing Google Analytics goals into an AdWords account, importing statistics from an Analytics account into an AdWords account, accessing retargeting or remarketing features, adding information from multi-channel funnels, etc. This feature will help you better understand when users click on ads. User interests and demographics linked to Google Analytics also help improve performance by targeting precise audiences differentiated by age, gender, and interest center criteria.

Find out the origin of website traffic using Google Analytics tools

Traffic can come from a variety of channels, including organic search, which matches user queries in search engines, from a technical perspective, organic or natural site SEO, referrals, linking support, offering a direct link to a site page.

What is Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4?

Over the past years, Google Analytics has experienced several important changes and major updates. A more advanced version has appeared, Universal Analytics, which gives you the opportunity to set your own parameters and indicators in your work with data. In 2023, Google Analytics 4, a next-generation tool, replaced and merged Google Analytics and Universal Analytics. As of July 1, 2024, all customers will lose access to Universal Analytics, but can easily migrate to Google Analytics 4.

The structure and new GA4 features

In early 2024, Google added new elements and tools to GA4. The working part of advertising has become more convenient and both parts are more interconnected. You will find two dedicated spaces:

Advertising - a section that gives you the opportunity to analyze your campaigns. In the Overview section you will find custom reports and data APIs, anonymous and aggregated information about advertising campaigns.

Reports - a section with data on how users interact with your sites and applications.

You will also find other tools necessary for full-fledged work with Google Analytics:

The Admin section contains account settings where you can share access, remove users, delete your account, etc.
The All Filters area allows you to view the totality of your account's filters. So, if you exclude any internal traffic, referrals, etc., all of these filters will appear here.
In Data Streams you will find the basic settings for your GA4 resource. Here you can find the GA4 dimension ID, instructions for adding tags, advanced dimension settings, and more.
Events is where you can create some events in GA4.
In the Conversions section you you can designate any of your events as a conversion. While UA has a maximum of 20 conversions per account, GA4 will allow you to create up to 30.
Audiences allows you to create custom audiences for your GA4 account. Although they are primarily used for Google Ads, SEOs can still use them to measure user behavior and site activity.
Data settings is a tool that allows you to determine how you collect the data. Data settings consist of four parts: Data collection, Google Signals, Data storage and Data filters.
The Channel Groups section allows you to create your own channel groups to filter incoming traffic for your advertising campaigns.

We have listed above only some of the functions of Google Analytics. Its structure allows you to customize and create your own tool, tailored to your needs and goals. If you want to understand all the Google Analytics tools in more detail, you can contact the Analytics Academy with free online courses.