GA4, or Google Analytics 4, is the latest version of Google’s web analytics platform. Effective July 1, 2023, the current version of GA (Universal Analytics) will sunset requiring everyone to use the latest and greatest from Google– except for the paid model of GA, 360. While GA4 has several benefits for healthcare marketers, there are also some potential concerns that have recently been raised. Keep in mind, most of those concerns would be similar with other well-known analytics programs, dramatically reducing the options (and data visibility) then available.
Before GA4, a connection from Google Analytics to BigQuery was only available for those that paid for the Analytics 360 version. However, with GA4, a free connector was made available to all users, allowing Google to open BigQuery to all businesses. Undoubtedly, this is a business-savvy move for Google, since it allows them to attain revenue from the cost of querying and storing data on the platform. However, despite the cost, this gives businesses the ability to access a phenomenal tool that can help them scale up their data analysis on their GA4 data should they have the specialized expertise available. Here are a few reasons why you should use BigQuery with your GA4 data.
You may have noticed that Google sent out an email last week which caused a lot of confusion, because it said to upgrade to the latest tag within Google Analytics. This is going from analytics.js to gtag.js. Part of the reason it caused so much confusion is because obviously you want to make sure that you’re running the latest version of Google Analytics and people were concerned.
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