Diego Caro

Diego Caro

Data & CRO Consultant

GA4 & DV360: discover the benefits of this new integration

21 December 2021

2021 has been a year of continuous change within the field of digital marketing. This year has brought the approval and reinforcement of new regulations, changes in terms of privacy, and new functionalities. We are facing continuous challenges. We must learn to adapt to help our clients, advertisers, and agencies to develop within this new digital environment.

Privacy is one of the most important changes this year. There are also new regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Plus, we are facing updates in search engines and measurement (Cookieless, ITP, etc.). It may seem like an overwhelming new ecosystem, but there are solutions. In this article, we focus on how to approach those changes for our future programmatic campaigns. 

The first of those solutions is GA4 and its integrations with Display & Video 360

This new version of Google Analytics gives us (advertisers and agencies) the ability to evolve in terms of predictive audiences. Now, we can identify behavior patterns that will help us:

  • to focus our efforts
  • to better understand market trends (such as probability of purchase, abandonment, or income prediction), 
  • register user’s paths to conversion in real time,
  • to identify where the user exits the funnel (customer journey) 

With model-based data analysis together with Display & Video machine learning, we can improve the performance of our campaigns.

What are the benefits of the integration between Google Analytics 4 and Display & Video 360?

  1. GA4’s renewed interface offers us important insights related to the creation and analysis of audiences, as well as estimates of behavior probabilities and tracking of conversions from events. DV360 will be compatible as a destination for audiences created in GA4, with a few exceptions. This will allow us to combine them with our audiences with 1st party cookies in the DV audience profile, to create audiences with those users who usually buy or who return to the site often, those who have seen the site in detail, etc.
  2. Conversion export Custom Bidding (CB) allows us to export cross-platform conversions to DV360 for use in Custom Bidding, using GA’s cross channel and last click attribution model. As you may know, CB offers the possibility of creating our own bidding algorithm, though for its development it needs to reach a minimum volume of conversions. This connection will provide a greater quantity of data and therefore can improve the performance of experiments.
  3. Conversion Export with Native Bidding Integration: we can now export cross-platform conversions to DV360 for Native Bidding. This helps us better understand our audiences through more valuable data that will serve as the basis for the creation of our placements and our bids.
  4. Real-time data enabling GTM preview and new advanced reporting functionalities to analyze the customer journey in detail by creating new reports. For example, consider a user who we know will be searching for flights online, based on their real-time searches for flights and hotels. We can use GA4 in conjunction with DV to ensure that our message reaches users at the most effective time in order to generate additional conversions.

How does GA4 integrate with DV360?

It’s very simple: it’s actually done in the same way that it was done with Google Analytics Universal. The interesting thing is that we keep both links active (GA4 and GA3) and we start collecting historical data for future actions.

With these new changes in regulations and updates, this phrase from John Lennon has come to mind:

“I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever’s going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan.” 

-John Lennon

So… How do I get started?

If you and your team want to get moving with GA4, reach out to us! You can fill our contact form here and one of our team members will be in touch shortly.