[MUSIC PLAYING]
BREEN BAKER: Hi, everyone.
Welcome to another training series
from Google Analytics PMs.
Today, we're going to cover the differences between UA
and Google Analytics 4.
My name is Breen Baker.
I'm a Senior Product Manager on the Google Analytics team,
and I'll be leading you through this training today.
Before I get started, just wanted to remind everybody
if you're not already aware that this is part of a broader
training series led by Google Analytics Product Managers
in order to help you understand and set up
Google Analytics for properties delivered
by the folks who built them.
So we'll be offering some step by step guidance,
including some demonstrations in some of these trainings,
and we hope you enjoy the trainings.
Today, we'll be covering a number of topics--
enhanced measurement as well as event modification
and creation, event parameter examples,
along with conversions and audiences, and then
lastly, organization and governance
followed by privacy controls.
So we'll start with enhanced measurement as well as event
modification and creation.
So Universal Analytics had seven rigidly structured event types.
You can see a couple of the examples here--
page view, timing, and then the one catchall for all custom
events, custom event.
Google Analytics 4 has broken free of that paradigm
and now can enable any set of any named events
to be collected.
So you can name your events--
again, as some examples are here-- foo,
video start, or really whatever you want.
And this was designed to enable you
to fit the names of these interactions
that your end users are engaging with your property
on to fit the actual name of those interactions
and not have to overload some concept like category action
and label to help understand what is actually going on.
So again, that's a very extensible framework--
a lot more flexible than Universal Analytics.
Adding to that, we also have a flexible set
of parameters that can be sent with each event.
So again, going back to Universal Analytics,
we had a system where you could send us
a set of parameters-- highly valuable parameters,
but a strict set of parameters.
Specifically for custom event, category action, and label
was the way that you could send any and all information,
and you had to best fit whatever you were trying to collect
into those three parameters.
With Google Analytics 4, you can, again, break free of that.
You can send 25 parameters for free--
and up to 100 parameters for 360 clients--
and you can call these parameters whatever
you want that best fits what's actually being stored,
what actual attribute is being classified
underneath that event.
So this was built, again, so it could best
fit your actual company's language, how
your employee's name the kind of interactions and things
that are occurring with your end users,
and develop reports specific to those concepts that really
speaks truth to your employees.
Specifically to events and parameters,
again, UA had six rigid sets of events
and then one kind of catchall custom event.
You could send a very well known but rigid kind
of set of parameters along with those events,
and that's basically all you could do.
So our users overloaded things like category action and labels
so that all of their custom things were in one place,
and it was more or less difficult for them to navigate.
GA4 allows you to name these custom events however you want
and actually go and find the reports specific to that event.
So you no longer have to go to one catchall place of all
of your custom actions.
You can name the action appropriately, and then
go to the place that best describes those interactions,
and then check out the parameters
and see the attributes that are associated with them.
And then building on top of that,
GA4 has developed a set of recommended events
that you can collect along with parameters that
should accompany those events.
And when implemented, Google Analytics 4
delivers a specific experience designed around that.
So e-commerce is a good example where
there's a set of recommended events
where, if you collect the data in the right structure,
we'll deliver a host of end reports
inside of our UI to help you understand
the full e-commerce experience.
Conversions and audiences really derive
from those events and those parameters,
and the first thing to note is really
that Google Analytics 4 has just more.
You're able to classify more events
as conversions because of this extensible and flexible event
model.
GA4 also becomes more expressive with respect to audiences.
If you can imagine sending only three pieces of custom
information, the rigidity of what that created for audience
classification was real.
Now that I can send a number of events
of any name along with 25 parameters of any name,
I can be very descriptive and expressive with my events
and then build audiences based on that expectation
of that expressiveness.
So it's a far more flexible schema, but also
far more flexible audiences in terms of what you can define
and how you can define it so that it's easy to understand
what you're looking at.
And then last but certainly not least-- very cool--
is the concept of audience triggers.
So in Google Analytics 4 you can set an event
to be fired when a user enters an audience.
Why might you want to do that?
You might want to target a user from the perspective
of a conversion occurring and not based on an audience.
I might want to do some very specific things based
on some conversion, and that conversion
might be perfectly described by the existing
definition of an audience.
I should just go ahead and use that directly and not
try to fire a conversion using code or even using
event editing and creation.
So again, these additional tools provide more flexibility
to create objects that are more expressive,
audiences, and conversions that I can then
activate more directly in a better way in the ads tools.
Moving on to organization and governance now.
If you are aware of what Universal Analytics had
for organization and governance and a lot of other features,
it was views.
Views was kind of the catchall solution that dealt, again,
with organization, governance, and actually
a few other features that are orthogonal from those two
topics totally different things.
In Google Analytics 4, we tried to make
it more easy to understand and navigate
by splitting these two concepts up.
So in Google Analytics 4, you can actually organize data,
and you can govern them using two different tools.
Just to call out the governance tools--
which we'll go over on the next slide--
are 360 only.
Those are subproperties and roll-ups.
But for organization, that's available to anyone.
So inside Google Analytics 4 today,
I can create a custom report.
That custom report feels a lot like a Universal Analytics
custom report.
I can select a number of dimensions.
I can add a filter to that.
But that's where the similarities stop.
Because I can, in Google Analytics 4, take this custom
report, and I can put it inside of what
we call a report collection, which you can
consider a folder of reports.
And then I can share that folder in my left navigation
with the specific name-- again, whatever name
you want to give it.
Let's say it's my East Coast marketing set of reports,
and so I create a folder called East Coast marketing.
I'm going to put that into my left nav
so that my East Coast marketing team knows
exactly where to go to see the data and the experience
that I've built for them.
That organizational experience is available for everyone.
And then again, for governance, we
have subproperties and roll-ups. Subproperties
is a property with a subset of data,
which you create a filter to create
that subset of data, which you then give a subset of users
access to.
Versus a roll-up which works similarly
to a Universal Analytics property in that it's
a group of properties.
It's going to ingest data from multiple properties
and process all of that data together.
The net benefit from Google Analytics 4 roll-up properties
over Universal Analytics properties
is that it's not just a set of reports.
A roll-up property is a fully-fledged property,
fully featured, and ready to do everything
you would expect an ordinary property to do.
So specifically for subproperties
and roll-up properties-- which, remember,
are 360 only features-- this slide
can help you understand a very typical case
of how we see subproperties and role-ups being used today.
So as you can see here, we have a couple source properties--
could be more than two, but in this example,
we'll just show two--
where I have reason to break this information out by region.
And it's a very common use case.
So for Source Property 1 I've broken it out
into US East and US West.
In the course of Source Property 2,
I've broken out my Canada region very specifically
because that's very important, apparently,
for my Source Property 2.
And then I'm going to roll all of that data
up into my global property up above.
For the source property, that's meant to focus--
let's say, the US East team on the US East data
so they don't get distracted by the data coming from US West.
Same thing for the Canada subproperty.
And for the roll-up, I'm bringing all this data
together for my global marketing team
so that they can action across these regions
and do more global, more comprehensive marketing
campaigns.
And then lastly, we'll end with privacy controls.
So there's a difference from UA and GA4
basically in terms of the granularity of control.
UA does have privacy controls.
You're able to turn on and off the collection of information.
You're able to turn on and off the sharing
of that information.
However, in Google Analytics 4, we took it one step further.
So not only can you choose what data is collected,
you can choose the region that that data is collected.
Specifically, I'm referring to Google Signals here.
And then additionally in terms of linking and sharing data
with activation advertising tools,
you can also choose which regions
would pass data to those systems using the sensitive data.
So you can-- both on the collection side
and on the activation side--
control very granularly at the region level
what data is used for behavioral from collection side
or advertising on the activation side.
And this is clearly targeted to enable different regions
to operate in different ways based
on the regulations of those different places.
And so we'll close with a typical takeaway slide
to remind you of the key elements of what we hope you've
learned from this session.
One is that Google Analytics 4 empowers marketers to collect
data directly from the UI.
We've taken great leaps to reduce
the amount of coding that's necessary,
and you can even create an event that's
derived from another event, which
then creates an audience which then has an audience triggered.
These things can play and build on top of each other
and create very advanced collection models,
so I advise you all to take a deep look at that.
The second is that events and audiences are more expressive.
So when we're thinking about Google Analytics 4,
we shouldn't be thinking like we did with Universal Analytics.
We really can break away from the type of events and event
names that we used to collect before and really break away
from the kind of rigid kind of parameter sets
that we were allowed to collect before.
I'm speaking specifically to category action and label.
For governance, just know that governance is a core concept.
So all of the organizational features, the subproperties
and roll-ups-- like I said-- were just regular properties.
There's nothing built in here so that there's
any special element where I can only
access one thing in one special place
or have one capability only in one property type.
These features are core to every property
and are universal tools across all property types.
That's important to understand.
And then lastly, that Google Analytics 4
has and will continue to have more advanced privacy controls.
I know this is really important because we are now in
and we'll continue to move deeper
into a more privacy-centric world where
this is going to become more and more important.
And so lots of energy is being put into that on the Google
Analytics 4 side, and you can already
see the fruits of that labor already.
Thank you all again for joining us today
for this training series.
Once again, this is part of a broader training series,
and we hope you all can tune in for other trainings as well.
If you have any additional questions,
the Google Analytics 4 Help Center
is a great resource for any questions you might have.
And if you happen to be a 360 client, of course,
we recommend you reaching out to your point of contact.
Thank you.