Over the past several months, Google engineers have been working tirelessly to improve their measurement product suite across multiple platforms, like Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, and Google Analytics (GA4). Additional tools and service offerings like Tag Assistant and Data Manager API have been thrust into the spotlight and have been positioned as vital for organizations of all levels of analytical engagement.
A concept that Google has voiced in parallel with the product and platform ramp-up this year has been “Data Strength”. What Google means by Data Strength is that the more data sources that can be connected, the more complete view of your customer’s touchpoints and journeys you as a business owner and/or marketer will have, leading to better decision-making and better results.
If you haven’t integrated CRM, Email marketing, app data streams or other first-party data platforms with your GA4 account, you are now potentially missing out on some valuable insights and critical alerts. GA4’s updated AI Overviews can now surface insights beyond standard event and website page performance, allowing website owners and marketing teams to be alerted of anomalies, sudden spikes, and unexpected shifts in their data.
Consider the following example from a real-world GA4 scenario. For this property, AI Overviews detected engagement declines from United States traffic and from Chrome browsers by analyzing the automatically collected user_engagement event:
When we further analyze this property’s data, we realized that a Marketo integration did not have proper UTM campaign tracking parameters on outbound email sends. This particular GA4 property has good “Data Strength”, and its AI Overviews were able to detect a surge in Unassigned traffic tied to Marketo that it otherwise did not expect, had standard UTM campaign tracking parameters been appended as they normally would have.
AI Overviews in GA4 are becoming an essential feature for more than user and audience insights. They are also well-positioned to be an alert / monitoring system, so as long as your Data Strength is good and your platforms are properly connected to the centralized data intelligence hub that the Google team is effectively turning GA4 into. With so many options to connect data, from utilizing Data Manager (within Google Ads and through its API) to connecting your Google My Business location listings, social media accounts, ad platform cost data and CRM lead & purchase data, your GA4 property is ready to become your centralized analytics operational system. How is your Data Strength? How is your analytics platform inter-connected to provide your team maximum, near real-time insights into all stages and phases of your customer’s journey with your brand or business? We would love to hear from you and work collaboratively to help you improve your Data Strength, so that features like AI Overviews and Ask Advisor can provide immediate value and turn your marketing, IT, or business operations team into a strategic, rapid action taking team.
