Your GA4 Migration is Finished - Now What?

Data Strategy

Jul 19

The cutoff for migrating to GA4 has come and passed. We’ve outlined how to get more value from your data and what you should focus on now.

Whether you spent two years as a major initiative migrating your hyper-custom analytics implementation or you woke up in July 2023 and realized your Universal Analytics property was no longer collecting data, we’re all facing a new version of the world’s most popular analytics tool.

So now what? GA4 is obviously different from its predecessor, but will you be different this time around?

Some companies rely on their digital analytics data to make many of their business decisions and evaluate their performance based on what happens on their site. In contrast, others have maintained a digital analytics tool for years and need to utilize the tool more.

One great thing about this forced migration is that every company can evaluate their data usage and improve things (ok, maybe that’s the optimist in us talking, but bear with us!)

Post Migration Next Steps

We all need to take some practical steps after migrating to a new tool, whether we were prepared for them or not. Insight Lime uses a strategic plan to map out different phases of a major tool migration - but to summarize, you have a few phases.

GA4 Migration Plan — Here’s an example of how Insight Lime structures migration plans for our clients.

Organizational Impact Analysis - Before starting a major migration project or selecting a new vendor, the best way to get an ideal outcome is to do an evaluation of the impact on the organization. For GA4, unfortunately, if you were a Google Analytics client, you had no choice but to migrate to GA4 or a new analytics tool. However, you can still evaluate how much of a lift that will be for your company so you can plan resources better.
Dual-Tagging/Migration Time - You spent the most time mapping your current implementation and testing the new tagging here. If you were proactive, you might have spent some time getting familiar with the interface or doing a pilot project with GA4 data.
Post migration communications, reporting, and strategy initiatives - You can rethink the quality and quantity of reporting, how you run analysis, and improve the communication of data quality and initiatives across the organization. It’s a crucial time period to maintain or build trust in data in your organization.

In this post-migration phase, a few key projects can hugely increase your data’s value. Making this extra effort while everyone is getting settled with the new tool means you build trust with your internal stakeholders and also have a great opportunity to cut things that aren’t working while everyone is already comfortable (as comfortable as they can be) with change.

Step 1: Do a Discrepancy Audit & Create a Data Discrepancy One-Sheet

No matter how thorough you have been with your implementation, there will be discrepancies between your Universal Analytics data and your GA4 data. Period. Why? Because there are measurement differences between the two, and on top of that, almost every website has some amount of complexity that will cause some tags to fire unexpectedly or have one or two tags that weren’t implemented properly.

The only way that your analytics team (and all other teams that rely on digital analytics data) will feel comfortable with the new version is to dig into the differences in the data. Doing a thorough check of:

Differences between finance back-end data and revenue numbers in your analytics tool
User count and other core metric differences
New metrics (like engagement rate) and how they are different from metrics you are familiar with

Once you have mapped these out and done the work to address anything that is an error in the tracking, you can create a Data Discrepancy One-Sheet. This is a document you can share across the organization whenever there are questions about a data source and its quality. It also can include standards in your industry (for example, most digital analytics has at least a 10% discrepancy between finance data and up to a 30% discrepancy).

Are Discrepancies Bad?

Those figures can sound like a BIG difference if you haven’t heard them before. However, data discrepancies are part of life at companies. If you’d like to learn more about how to handle them, read our article about them here.

Once you’ve identified the issues in the data that need to be addressed, these should be your first priority. Fix anything that didn’t go quite as planned in the migration and clean up your data quality quickly so you can have confidence moving forward.

Step 2: Communicate the Changes

Even if you’ve known about the GA4 migration for some time, it isn’t a day-to-day conversation in all departments. You’d be surprised how many people that may even own data or use data from a platform don’t know the details of how it’s changing.

Creating a communication plan and being accountable to the company will help improve the adoption of new data platforms. If they don’t know about it, they won’t use it! And if they don’t know about the change and are surprised the next time they open a report, your teams will have to do additional work corresponding with people.

How to Communicate Major Data Changes (like GA4):

Take advantage of company all-hands meetings to announce the changes. This is a great time to share the information with a broader group.
Send out email announcements: Keep them clear and straight to the point with links to additional resources.
Organize an information-sharing session with relevant stakeholders - even if your company doesn’t have all-hands meetings, organizing a short meeting to communicate the changes to digital analytics data departments will help keep them informed and allow them to ask questions.

Ideally, you’ve been communicating the switch to GA4 for some time now - in fact, if people are tired of you talking about it, you’ve done your job well! But as we all know, business projects never go entirely as planned. So the next best time is “now” to ensure everyone is comfortable with the change.

Step 3: Adjust Data Schemas and Reporting

Your reporting will need to be switched over to GA4 from Universal. This means adjusting connections of integrations between BI tools and analytics (and marketing tools) and/or BigQuery or other databases where you store your GA data.

Depending on how extensive your reporting is, this could be a quick fix or a pretty major lift. Map out the reports you know will be affected and inform data engineering teams. You’ll likely need to adjust several data pipelines to feed in the new data.

As for the reports themselves, you’ll also need to evaluate whether the metrics need to be changed. For some metrics like Bounce Rate, you may be hit with a “N/A” on a dashboard because certain metrics are calculated differently in GA4.

Step 4: Find Some GA4 Data Use Cases

One of the most critical parts of a tool migration that many of us don’t go after is proving its value. We’ve all just spent quite some time and energy moving to a new analytics tool, whether you did decide to go for GA4 or if you decided to switch to another analytics tool.

Switching tools doesn’t have any inherent value. You most likely didn’t save money and spent some making the switch.

The best way to prove the value is to use the data from the tool. Here are some great ideas for use case projects that can impress your stakeholders and get some return on your investment:

Screen Flow Analysis - If you haven’t comprehensively analyzed the main flows through your website, now is a good time to do that!

A screen flow analysis is when you look at how customers are flowing through your website to identify the following:

Where are your biggest drop-offs? Do you have customers leaving at your product detail pages? Or do you have a higher-than-normal drop-off in the cart?
What are common paths that can highlight different shopping behaviors and site usage?
Are there pages that could use improvement that have higher drop-off points?

Create Improved Reporting

While GA4 may have a very different interface, it does have some great features, like the Explore reports that can give your team more flexibility and customized information that they can explore more easily. Creating additional reporting for your teams that can give them self-service access can give you a great opportunity to show the value of GA4.

Step 5: Implement Enhance Ecommerce Tracking

If you're an e-commerce business, one of the key ways to unlock the full potential of GA4 is by implementing Enhanced eCommerce Tracking. This feature allows you to track and analyze customer behavior throughout their entire journey on your website, from product views to purchases.

By implementing Enhanced eCommerce Tracking, you can gain valuable insights into your customers' shopping patterns and make data-driven decisions to optimize your online store. You'll be able to track metrics such as product impressions, clicks, add to carts, and purchases, enabling you to identify popular products, optimize your product pages, and improve the overall user experience.

Additionally, Enhanced eCommerce Tracking provides valuable information about your sales funnel. You can analyze the drop-off rates at each stage of the funnel and identify bottlenecks that may be hindering conversions. Armed with this knowledge, you can implement targeted strategies to increase conversion rates and maximize your revenue.

Step 6: Leverage Machine Learning Capabilities

GA4 incorporates advanced machine learning capabilities to revolutionize data analysis and insights generation. Take advantage of these features to better understand your customers and drive meaningful business outcomes.

For instance, the Predictive Analytics feature in GA4 can help you anticipate customer behavior and predict future outcomes. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, GA4 can analyze historical data to identify patterns and trends. This empowers you to make proactive decisions and take actions that align with your customer's preferences.

*Psst! Read about a pragmatic approach to AI here. →*

Another powerful feature is AI-Generated Insights. This functionality automatically surfaces valuable insights from your data, saving you time and effort in manual analysis. GA4 uses machine learning algorithms to identify significant trends, anomalies, and opportunities hidden within your data. These insights can uncover new growth opportunities, highlight areas for improvement, and guide your marketing strategies.

While these features are still being fully developed, they inspire you to build on your existing insights generation and identify areas to analyze further at a glance - where this type of analysis took much longer.

Step 7: Set Up Custom Metrics and Events

Custom metrics and events allow you to track and measure specific actions and behaviors on your website that are unique to your business goals. GA4 provides a flexible framework for defining custom metrics and events, enabling you to capture the data points that matter most to your organization.

Consider the specific actions and behaviors that align with your business objectives. It could be tracking the number of form submissions, video views, downloads, or any other user interactions that indicate engagement or conversion. By setting up custom metrics and events, you can monitor these key performance indicators and gain insights into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and website experiences.

Furthermore, custom metrics and events can be used to create audience segments based on specific behaviors or actions. This segmentation lets you target your marketing efforts more precisely and deliver personalized experiences to different customer groups.

Step 8: Continuously Learn and Iterate

The migration to GA4 is just the beginning of a data-driven journey for your organization. It's crucial to adopt a mindset of continuous learning and iteration to maximize the value of your data.

Regularly review your analytics reports, data discrepancies, and performance metrics to identify areas for improvement. Use A/B testing and experimentation to test different strategies and optimizations. By measuring the impact of your changes, you can refine your approach and make data-backed decisions.

Stay current with the latest developments in GA4 and take advantage of new features and enhancements as they become available. Google frequently releases updates to its analytics platform, introducing new capabilities and functionalities. You can leverage these advancements to extract deeper insights and gain a competitive edge by staying informed.

Conclusion

The migration to GA4 marks a significant milestone in the evolution of digital analytics. While the transition may have presented some challenges, it also offers tremendous opportunities to unlock the full potential of your data. By following these post-migration steps and embracing the new features and capabilities of GA4, you can drive valuable insights, make informed decisions, and propel your business forward.

Remember, data is only valuable if it's utilized effectively. Take the time to understand your data, communicate the changes to your teams, and implement strategies that align with your business objectives. With GA4, you have a powerful tool at your disposal, ready to empower your organization with actionable insights and drive sustainable growth. Embrace the possibilities and embark on this data-driven journey with confidence.

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