Cristian Tirado

Cristian Tirado

Data Analytics Consultant

GA4: a new solution for solving companies’ current and future data challenges

14 June 2022

Technological trends and innovations mean companies must constantly evolve. The market demands growth in a globalized and even more deeply digital world. Making the most of these technological improvements involves understanding and capturing data to make better decisions based on customer preferences. 

Speaking of major tech innovations

Google recently launched Google Analytics 4. This tool aims to provide a tool capable of adapting and meeting the new needs of a more digital world. Additionally, it overcomes many technical challenges associated with:

  • Integrating models of artificial intelligence
  • New regulations about the use of information
  • Structuring and management of large volumes of data, among others.

Implementing GA4 makes it possible to overcome the difficulties that arise in the digital and data world. According to Harvard Business Review*, there are several main challenges that arise in digital business today. First, only 26.5% of organizations consider themselves “data-driven,” so this is still an aspiration for many. Second, it has been argued that 80% of all new data is unstructured, meaning that it cannot be easily captured and quantified. Increasingly, companies must come to appreciate that data is a business asset that flows through an organization. Third, this year’s survey* reflects and highlights the depth of corporate concern regarding data ethics and accountability. Currently, only 21.6% of data leaders say the industry has done enough to address data and AI (Artificial Intelligence) ethics issues and standards.

What do these issues mean for today’s organizations?

It is important to understand that these issues play a key role in organizations. As such, the latest version of Google Analytics (GA4) aims to address these issues by providing a framework for improvements to artificial intelligence, cookieless improvements, and others. Here, we will take a closer look at these improvements and the impact they have on these business issues with data. 

  • From the first perspective of achieving a data-driven organization, the GA4 format allows for better integration with all Google tools for data collection, achieving information in function. Additionally, it offers the generation of reports based on the customer lifecycle. This allows us to understand each stage traveled by the customer on our website or e-commerce platform. In turn, this tool allows us to have a broader view of the interaction of customers with our products or services across devices and channels. 
  • The second perspective is about unstructured data. GA4 presents many competitive advantages for data tracking and analytical predictions based on artificial intelligence models. Also, the tracking of events without code implementation allows us to generate real-time information associated with our website. Likewise, we’ll have the ability to provide a level of detail of the data on websites and mobile applications. Similarly, it generates a new set of more accurate metrics on user tracking and product engagement. Moreover, it can be connected to BigQuery for storing and querying large volumes of data as well as enhanced data visualization capabilities. Such solutions can overcome these unstructured data barriers and allow for organizational improvements.
  • The third perspective refers to the ethics and accountability of data with AI. GA4 also complies with the regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). So with this tool, we can have a more specific user data control. Also, it helps combat the future loss of third-party cookies. These will become less common in the future, so machine learning tools will become more important, based on additional legislative standards and ethical criteria. 

How to proceed

Therefore, we can conclude that the Google Analytics GA4 tool presents a wide set of elements, tools and metrics that allow companies to overcome these barriers in their organizations. As such, they’ll be able to generate added value, better decision making, growth in KPIs, revenue, and positioning of brands in a digital market increasingly immersed in artificial intelligence models, data management, and its regulation. 

If you’re not sure how to get started, we can help. Get in touch with our team today! You can reach us by email at info@makingscience.com. Or, fill our contact form at www.makingscience.com/contact.

*Source of article taken from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2022/02/why-becoming-a-data-driven-organization-is-so-hard