How to Migrate Google Analytics GA4: Step-By-Step Guide

Google analytics is one of the most essential tools in the market to analyze your performance. It helps you to understand the website traffic and create and form strategies according to it. It has been a trusted partner of all marketing companies for a decade. The best quality of Google analytics is self-improvisation.  

Google Analytics updates itself at a regular time interval. Therefore, to improve the performance and provide a better ROI, we will discuss its updated version of Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

 

What is Google Analytics GA4?

With the help of Google Analytics 4, you can monitor user activity on your websites and mobile apps. For a developer audience, this documentation offers implementation guidelines and reference materials.

 

GA4 is a brand-new property created for the measurement of the future:

  • Gather information from apps and websites to better understand the client experience.
  • Instead of session-based data, it uses events.
  • Includes privacy protections, including cookie less measurement, behavioral modeling, and conversion optimization
  • Without using complicated models, predictive capabilities provide guidance.
  • Direct integrations with media platforms aid in generating activity on your app or website.

To get the best benefit out of GA4, you need to migrate from the older version to this one. However, the procedure isn't that stringent. This write-up will discuss steps you can follow to migrate from the older version to GA4. It has become one of the favorite platforms of SEO Companies in Lucknow. 

 

 A step-by-step guide to migrating to GA4:

 

Create a new GA4 property:

Google Analytics is a web analytics services that offers data and fundamentals analytical capabilities for marketing and search engine optimization needs. Anyone with a Google account can use the service for free, which is part of the Google Marketing Platform.

To monitor website performance and gather visitor data, Google Analytics is employed. For example, organizations can use it to identify the primary user traffic sources, evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives and campaigns, track goal accomplishments (like purchases and cart additions), identify patterns and trends in user engagement, and gather other visitor data like demographics. In addition, small and medium-sized retail websites frequently use Google Statistics to collect and analyze various customer behavior analytics, which may be utilized to enhance marketing efforts, increase website etc.

 

Name your Property:

The property name, industry category, advertising features, and other settings should be updated.

To edit property settings, you need to have the Editor role. Editing a property

  • Register with Google Analytics.
  • Go to the Property you wish to update by clicking Admin.
  • Click Property Settings in the PROPERTY column to edit any of the following:

Name of the Property: This is the title given to the Property in Analytics.

The Property's default URL is provided.

Default View: When importing data from Analytics into integrated services (such as Ad-Words Express or Google Play), the default view is utilized.

 

The industry-vertical category most closely resembles your Property is called the "industry category."

  • Advanced Settings: Choose whether manual tagging for GCLID (Google Ads and Search Ads 360 integrations) and DCLID values should precede auto-tagging (Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360 reporting integrations).
  • You can enable or disable support for advertising features.
  • Obtain data from the Google Play Developer Console: Indicate whether or not you want Analytics to display Google-Play statistics about your apps. (Only for app properties)
  • iOS Campaign Tracking: Activate or deactivate capabilities for tracking campaigns. To monitor the effectiveness of in-app campaigns, use custom URLs.
  • Turn on or off enhanced link attribution in in-page analytics. Select whether to open the In-Page Analytics report in full or embedded mode (inside Analytics) (in its browser window).
  • Configure Search Console to link data from Search Console to Analytics. Save all the info.

 

How to create a web data stream;

You need to configure your first data stream as the following action. This data source will send events to your Google Analytics 4 property. One Property can contain many data sources. As an illustration, three websites, one for an iOS app and one for an Android app.

Let's concentrate on a Web stream in this blog post. Choose it.

Then type your website's URL (for instance, the protocol (https) has already been chosen, as you can see. Enter your website's name after that.

In Google Analytics 4, you can select or disable Enhanced Measurement when you create a web data stream. It is intended to assist marketers in including as many events as possible in reports without requiring them to work with developers or set them up in Google Tag Manager.

 

Finding your measurement ID:

Now all you need is to find your measurement ID in GA4. Here are the steps to help you find the GA4 measurement ID.

Step 1: Go to the GA4 property section and click "Admin" on the bottom left.

Step 2- now, under Property, click "Data Stream"

Step 3- Click "Web"

Step 4- Now, you have to click on the web data stream name

Step 5- You can see your measurement ID on the top right

 

Creating a GA4 configuration tag through GTM:

You will require your "Measurement ID" once you have chosen this tag. In Universal Analytics, this is effectively the same as "Tracking ID." This is located in the Property area of the admin panel under the Data Streams heading (I've deleted mine from the screenshot below, but the arrow directs you there). To instantly copy it to your clipboard, click the tiny copy icon next to it.

 

Here is how you create your configuration tag through GTM:

To make a Google Analytics 4 Configuration tag, follow these steps:

  • Select Tags > New.
  • Navigate to Tag Configuration. 
  • Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration should be selected.  
  • Enter the ID of your measurement.

 

To send page views automatically, keep the Send a page view event when this configuration loaded option is selected.

Optionally, select the Send to server container checkbox to route all events associated with this GA4 setup to the provided Server Container URL for usage with a Tag Manager Server container rather than directly to Google Analytics. More information about Server-Side Tagging.  

Add any settings you want to configure under Fields to set if you like. For the most outstanding results, use the specified event parameter names.

 

Creating and testing the new tag:

Here is a step-by-step guide to creating a new tag:

Creating a GTM Account: Log in to Tag Manager Step by Step

 

  • Click the Create Account button. 
  • Enter the Account Name here. 
  • An account is the highest level of organization. 
  • Each organization needs one account. 
  • An account can have several containers. 
  • Choose a country. 
  • Choose whether or not to share data. 
  • Enter the Container Name here. 
  • Select a descriptive container name for internal use, usually the name of the site or app.

 

Choose a Target Platform:

  • Web
  • iOS
  • Android
  • AMP
  • Server

 

Click the Create button.   

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Hopefully, this guide will help you smooth migration from my regular to Google Analytical 4. You might feel a bit troubled initially, but once you start the procedure, everything gradually falls in place.