From the course: Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Essential Training

What's new in GA4? - Google Analytics Tutorial

From the course: Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Essential Training

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What's new in GA4?

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- [Instructor] Google Analytics 4 is the new, completely from-the-ground-up rewrite of the world's most popular digital analytics package. Years in the making, there is a completely new data model, a new interface and a ton of new functionality. So one question is the name. Was there a Google Analytics 3? Well, originally there was Urchin. Urchin was the company that Google bought that was urchin.js and believe it or not, that still works if you send that data back to Google. They came out with Google Analytics, and this ran off of a JavaScript called ga.js. You may remember, then Google launched Universal Analytics, which was running on analytics.js and then later this GTAG.js, and now we have Google Analytics 4, which also runs on the GTAG.js. So this is the fourth iteration, and it brings a lot of changes and upgrades. Number one, it is completely event-driven. It is a total from-the-bottom-up rewrite of the data model, and it's more based on Firebase, but everything is event-driven now, which provides a lot of advantages that we'll go through. It also comes with automatic tracking, something called enhanced measurement, and this is really handy. It automates a whole bunch of things that you used to have to do by hand that were quite difficult. So things like scrolling down a page is now automatically tracked, outbound clicks to other sites, site search, where people search for things on your site itself, video engagements, video starts, video progress, video complete, file downloads, when people are downloading PDFs and so on. That's all automatically tracked. We also have cross-device tracking. It uses Google signals to understand when someone is using a mobile device and if, say, a laptop or a computer, and if that is a single person. So it no longer breaks that and treats it as two different people. So not only is it more accurate, but you get the insights that you understand when people are using different devices. They've recalculated the way that sessions are done and no longer breaks a session as it goes past midnight, the things that would make it look like a person had two different sessions when they actually only have one. They vastly improved the funnels and the pathing. We'll go through all of that, but it is much more extensible and intuitive and better represents what's happening on your site. The ability to do time-based analysis to understand how long it takes between events that are happening. There's also additional and more flexible conversion goals that can be set up to more accurately track what's happening on your site or app, and advanced users can export all of the data to the cloud via BigQuery, something that was previously only available in the enterprise version, and we won't get too far into that in this beginner's course, but, you know, it's worth saying that that is a pretty cool upgrade. So I'm really excited to show you all this new functionality. Let's dive in.

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