Orthotown June 2023 - 46

CONTINUING EDUCATION
can be used to make evidence-based decisions
about your marketing efforts. When measured
accurately and interpreted properly, the data can
help you determine which marketing campaigns
should be stopped because they're failing and
costing you money, as well as which campaigns
should be augmented because of their success.
Universal Analytics: Everyone's old friend!
For the past 15 years, 30 million website owners
have relied upon Google's free product, Google
Analytics, to collect and provide the above data.
Also known as Google
Analytics 3 and, more commonly,
Universal Analytics
(UA), this product has been
the mainstay of website
data tracking for a generation
of website owners and
marketers; UA provides
information about how people
interact with websites
and how effectively paid
advertising campaigns are performing.
And while there are other analytics software
packages available that provide a similar service,
UA is dominant in much of the small-business
sector because of its tight integration with other
Google products such as its pay-per-click (PPC)
program, Google Ads.
Google Analytics 4: Everyone's new friend?
Although it has its flaws-as does any other
software package-UA is a reliable, thoroughly
tested and well-understood product. Yet over
the past few years, Google began to introduce
the next generation of its analytics product,
Google Analytics 4 (GA4). As GA4 has become
more production-ready, Google announced in
mid-2022 that it would be turning off UA on
July 1, 2023, and that anyone who uses Google
Analytics would need to migrate to GA4 to
continue to receive the website data that Google
Analytics provides.
It's critical to use both
Google Ads and Google Analytics
together to fully understand
how paid advertisements
are performing and if their
costs have a worthwhile
return on investment.
Why do we need a new version
of Google Analytics?
One of Google's major drivers of revenue, Google
Ads, integrates directly with GA, and it's critical
to use both products together to fully understand
how paid advertisements are performing
and if their costs have a worthwhile
return on investment
(ROI). And while users can use
other analytics packages, most
marketers and their clients use
GA with Google Ads.
As you might imagine, one
of Google's logical overriding
goals with Google Ads is to
make sure people who advertise
on the platform are able to
accurately track the money they're spending and
their return on the investment.
With the increased focus we're seeing on how
privacy is handled on the internet-where web
browsers block tracking code for privacy purposes
and smartphones let you tell apps " not to
track " you-the mass of user behavior data that
Google and other advertising companies rely on
to help track the success of advertising campaigns
is getting thinner every day.
Google needed a new approach to accurately
track the way users interact with websites and
advertisements, and the solution they came
up with is Google Analytics 4. It may seem like
GA4 is a product designed solely around making
data more reliable for ecommerce providers
JUNE 2023 | 46 | ORTHOTOWN.COM
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Orthotown June 2023

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