We’re wrapping up our series on getting started with Google Analytics 4, with a Q&A with Russ Ketchum, director of Google Analytics. Here he talks about migrating from Universal Analytics and shares some GA4 power user moves.

Russ Ketchum: GA4 is truly different from Universal Analytics at its core — and that’s intentional. Before Google Analytics, page views and sessions were unfamiliar concepts. And, even so, they worked great for website analytics. But the world has evolved. “The internet” isn’t a synonym for a desktop website. The internet is all around us and that’s the world that we’ve built GA4 to measure. Streams, events, partial data, behavioral modeling, and so on are the “page views and sessions” of today’s connected world.

RK: It’s a great question. I’ll highlight two; one that helps customers migrate a little easier and another which highlights a big improvement we made to GA4 based on customer feedback about Universal Analytics. 

When a customer is migrating to GA4, one of the first things they need to consider is how to get the data they care about the most into the system. In Universal Analytics, the ability to measure events is somewhat limited with just a Category, Action, and Label to indicate a particular interaction. In GA4, customers can create as many events as they want and use parameters to be very descriptive. 

RK: Honestly, it’s a pretty wide range at this point. As you might expect, we have customers who are in the setup process so they’re asking lots of questions about the best way to structure their properties, their events, etc.. This is why we’ve made such a big investment in our Setup Assistant to make it as easy as possible to move from UA to Google Analytics 4. 

We also have customers who were experts in Universal Analytics and are now learning how to apply that expertise to GA4. We’ve already launched a lot of educational content aimed exactly towards this audience, but in 2023, we’re excited to add even more. 

RK: One of the reasons that Google Analytics is so unique is because our customers own their data — not Google. Because of this, we have an obligation to provide our customers with the controls and tools they need to comply with regulations wherever they operate, not just in the EU. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve introduced more granular privacy controls and we’ll continue to evolve as necessary.

RK: We appreciate the fact that the migration to GA4 is a heavylift for many of our customers. That’s why we recently made two announcements to make things a little easier. First, we announced an update to our Setup Assistant which will effectively “Jumpstart” our customers on the path to GA4 by creating a GA4 property and carrying over the settings from their Universal Analytics properties automatically.

RK: Customers can expect even more out of the customization features I mentioned earlier, especially for SMB customers. We have some pretty big plans for the Advertiser Workspace, so what you see there now really only scratches the surface.