ul
Rubie Mccloughan
For your Universal Analytics property, you configure cross-domain measurement via code (either in the source code through analytics.js or gtag.js, or via Google Tag Manager). For your Google Analytics 4 property, you do this via the Admin page.
Subdomains that represent a different grouping of pages for a particular primary domain (e.g., blog.website.com, news.website.com) can all be measured in the same Google Analytics property. Both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 properties do this automatically.
As with Universal Analytics, you can create your own "manual" form of roll-up properties by deploying the same tag ID across multiple domains, keeping in mind that users aren't deduplicated across domains.
A property contains the Google Analytics reports and data for your website and/or app. The reports and user interface that you see vary according to what kind of property you are viewing. A Universal Analytics property has different reports than a Google Analytics 4 property.
Google Analytics 4 subproperties, a 360 feature, are designed to give you the capabilities of views in the form of fully functioning properties. Subproperties get their data from 360 properties and constitute a full or partial subset of that data depending on how you configure them.
Create data filters to remove unwanted data as it comes into your Google Analytics 4 properties. You can create filters to remove both developer and internal traffic. There are also other Google Analytics 4 features that are similar to Universal Analytics view-related features.
Google Analytics 4 has three different filter modes to allow you to test out filters before applying them to production data. These modes include "Active", "Testing", and "Inactive", which dictate whether changes to data are temporary or permanent.
The ability to see debug traffic in DebugView, and to easily exclude debug traffic from your final data, was merged into Google Analytics 4 from Google Analytics for Firebase and is now available for web data streams in addition to app data streams. You can also enable debug mode for your Google Analytics 4 tags in Google Tag Manager by entering GTM Preview and Debug mode. In this way, you can take advantage of DebugView in Google Analytics 4 as well as a separate debug tab or panel for all tagging that you have applied to GTM.
In Google Analytics 4, there isn't a setting to enable/disable this feature. Bot filtering is automatically enabled, and the list of known bots and spiders is maintained by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
To measure custom events that overlap with enhanced measurement events but require additional data points not available through the enhanced measurement events (e.g., custom parameters), implement a custom event/parameter solution and disable the corresponding enhanced measurement event. For example, if you want more customized scroll tracking, disable the enhanced measurement version.
Google Analytics 4 captures a wide assortment of predefined events and event parameters. It also outlines a taxonomy of recommended events and event parameters. The predefined events and parameters offer two advantages over custom events and parameters:
Unifying users across devices and data streams provides a more accurate count of users and enables attribution, behavioral insights, and audience building across multiple sessions that would otherwise be fragmented.
By default, Google Analytics takes advantage of device ID (meaning browser cookie in the case of a website, or app instance id in the case of a mobile app) to associate multiple sessions with the same user. However, this dependency limits the ability to associate the same users across multiple devices. Populating User-ID for authenticated users allows you to bypass the dependency on cookies or app instance ID for associating multiple sessions with the same user, on the same device and data stream, or across devices and data streams.
User-ID in Universal Analytics and Google Analytics for Firebase primarily serves to unify sessions across different devices but within the same type of platform (meaning unifying a website visitor across desktop and mobile web, or a mobile app user on an Android phone and an Android tablet). In Google Analytics 4, User-ID also serves to meaningfully unify users across platforms/data streams, meaning a website visitor on desktop who also uses your app on an iPhone. The unified data model for web and mobile app in Google Analytics 4 can provide cohesive reporting and analysis for authenticated users across platforms.
The iOS and Android data streams that you configure for a Firebase project can also populate a Google Analytics 4 property. Similarly, when you create an iOS or Firebase data stream in Google Analytics 4, a new Firebase project is created. For this reason, if you've already created mobile-app data streams in a Firebase project, it's critical to initiate the integration from the Firebase project rather than from the Google Analytics 4 property.
If you are a Universal Analytics 360 customer who has continued to use the Google Services SDKs to collect app data in a Universal Analytics property, then you have two options to set up data collection in a Google Analytics 4 property:
Data import in Google Analytics is sometimes expressed as dimension widening in the sense that, in most cases, you populate one or more additional dimension values against a dimension that has already been populated, such as page category, product classifications, or campaign parameters against a page dimension, product ID, or campaign ID.
Use Measurement Protocol to directly send hits to the Google Analytics servers through basic HTTP requests from any programmable, networked environment, such as an app running on Windows Mobile, a point of sale or CRM, or a building directory running on a kiosk.
Google Analytics 4 provides a safeguard against Measurement Protocol spam. Measurement Protocol in Google Analytics 4 is required to include an api_secret key that's visible only in the Google Analytics 4 data-stream configuration, which should largely eliminate Measurement Protocol spam.
Key events in Google Analytics 4 can only be based on event names and not on other parameters. However you can define new events, either in your site code or via the user interface, when the parameters you specify have certain values, such as a page_view with a specific file_location. You can then mark this new event as a key event. The Destination goals article shows you how to do this.
For certain types of website or mobile app experiences, particularly in the content publisher realm, success is measured by overall duration or depth of engagement as much as by specific interactions.
Google Analytics 4 automatically generates the user_engagement event when the session lasts more than ten seconds, includes two or more pageviews, or contains a key event. Google Analytics 4 also uses this event to calculate the Average engagement time, Engaged users per session, and Average engagement time per session metrics.
You can also create audiences (and segments in Explorations) based on session count and engagement time, which you can then apply to your reports.
Universal Analytics destination and event goals can map to Google Analytics 4 key events, but if you need to include an event parameter value in your key event definition, you'll need to first generate a custom event that you can then designate as a key event.
The duration and pages/screens per session goals in Universal Analytics correspond to the user engagement events and metrics that are surfaced automatically in Google Analytics 4, as well as the segments and audiences that you can create and apply to your reporting.
With the configurable path exploration, Google Analytics 4 provides a great new benefit to free and enterprise users. Path explorations are easier to interpret and act upon than the Behavior flow and Events flow reports in Universal Analytics. Path explorations also span multiple sessions, which allows you to observe flows for the same users across devices and web/mobile data streams.
The option for defining either a starting point or an endpoint for path exploration represents another key benefit of this report format.
Note that URL-based dimensions such as page_location aren't available as a configuration option for path explorations, so page-level pathing in Google Analytics 4 reports depend on page title as a dimension.
Audiences that you create in Google Analytics 4 are automatically replicated in Firebase and vice versa. You can use audiences with several Firebase-specific services, such as A/B Testing and In-App Messaging.
Audiences that you create in Google Analytics 4 automatically become available for targeting in any linked Google Ads accounts; you don't need to share audiences individually.
Remarketing allows you to reach visitors who've shown a heightened level of engagement with your website but haven't yet interacted with a key event (for example, those who have reached step 4 of a 5-step goal funnel). You can also take advantage of remarketing to provide further support and incentives for users who have interacted with a key event.
You can take advantage of Google's privacy-safe, machine-learning capabilities to target your marketing campaigns to new users who share commonalities with users who have visited your website and whom you have included in an audience. Referred to as Similar Audiences in the Google Ads Display Network and Targeting Expansion in Display & Video 360, this capability can take advantage of the remarketing audiences that you have defined in Universal Analytics or Google Analytics 4.
Channel groupings provide a high-level breakdown for reporting by traffic acquisition sources. You can enhance the relevance of channel groups to your reporting audience by customizing for specific channel breakouts that best accommodate your acquisition strategy and different campaigns.
7fc3f7cf58