Making better decisions across the entire marketing funnel.

Google Analytics 4 is a brilliant tool that not only supports the digital marketing team in interpreting data but also members of the wider marketing landscape. Here at The PHA group, we are pleased to be working with our clients to lead the way in the implementation of GA4 alongside UA.

In adopting GA4 early alongside your UA you position yourself to begin filtering it in slowly to your marketing ecosystem. As we explained in a previous blog which you can read here, it is not a migration or upgrade, but a completely new property. This means you will need to build your data history before you begin to accumulate enough data to begin decision making. Therefore, implementing the property and training your team early in the process will be important.

One of the key benefits of GA4 is how it can help capture user data across the entire marketing funnel and demonstrate in more detail how the users interact with your brand. Therefore today, we are going to take a look at how various marketing functions can get the best out of GA4.

Brand Managers

Brand managers are often looking at the effectiveness of their communications as well as how the audience they are targeting is interacting with their brand. In addition, as they often are building campaigns both online and offline GA4 has a couple of reports that can help brand managers understand how valuable different audience segments are.

Firstly, GA4 has a better ability to build segments by interests. This allows the brand managers to build detailed segments across multiple age groups, genders and locations. In addition, they can then create segment overlaps to better understand how these segments interact with the brand. This will allow brand managers to shape their communications when trying to approach new audience segments.

Digital Marketing Managers

For years, the Digital Marketing teams out there have been focused on “Last click” reports which can seriously undervalue top of the funnel channels and overvalue those at the very bottom of the funnel.

GA4 allows you to tailor the attribution model to be used for reports using event scoped traffic dimensions which include source, medium, campaign and default channel grouping to name a few). This allows a more accurate view of the return on investment of channels across multiple touchpoints. Furthermore, GA4 also includes some explorer options which can be configured to show how different first acquisition channels influenced purchases.

Ecommerce Manager

The eCommerce team are at the forefront of products and the new GA4 is now far more product-centric with new visualisations that help you to easily identify your most valuable products. In addition, the UA style enhanced eCommerce metrics are still available and can allow the eCommerce team to understand how products are performing allowing for better forecasting and stock management. Although it must be said that often data collection in this area is poorly implemented and therefore as you begin your journey to GA4, you may be able to use this as the catalyst to capture more of this valuable data set.

PR Managers

As we get further up the funnel, GA4 improves on the behaviour flow that existed in UA and can benefit how PR campaigns are measured. The path exploration report is fully customisable and is designed to be manipulated to track the most important behaviours. This could include where users go after they land on a PR campaign landing page, or if users move through the landing page to purchase.

Have you been grappling with the decision to implement GA4? Are you holding off as you do not know where the responsibility lies? Then Why not get in touch with our team of experts today to discuss how we could support you in navigating this period of change in the world of insights and analytics.