Firstly, What Is Google Analytics?
To kick things off, we should establish what Google Analytics actually is and why it is important for schools. Google Analytics is a web analytics service that collects information about website traffic. The information gathered lets you know information about the people that visit your school website. The tool outlines useful details such as where visitors are from, how they got to your site, the actions they took, and the time spent on each page. This can obviously be used to track whether your school is attracting the correct audience to its website.
With the Google Analytics code installed, every page a user views is tracked and analysed. These statistics are then used for search engine optimisation (SEO) and marketing purposes. So, it’s not as scary as it sounds!
So What Is Google Analytics 4!?
Not only is Google Analytics a vital element for any school’s digital marketing activity, it’s also intuitive enough to be a gateway to help parents and faculty digitally engage with your school.
So, when Google announced in October 2020 that a new iteration of Analytics – Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – is on its way, it sparked a lot of curiosity. If you’re feeling a little apprehensive about the move over to the new platform, don’t worry! Put the kettle on, sit back, and let us explain all you need to know about the upcoming changes with this next generation platform.
How Does Google Analytics Data help for schools?
Google Analytics data can help you better understand how users interact with your site, what content they view the most, and importantly, how long they spend interacting with the content.
If you want to understand how often your brand-new website page or blog gets viewed, or you want to have a better insight to the effectiveness of your content, Google Analytics helps you achieve those goals.
If you begin to routinely use Google Analytics you can benefit from the data collected by certain metrics and then use this to your advantage when planning your marketing strategy.
Top 5 Google Analytics 4 metric data to track to improve and better understand your audience:
- Overall traffic and traffic sources – Calculate spikes in traffic and see what devices are being used to access your site.
- Audience location – What areas are generating your biggest audience, does this match expected data?
- Views by page – What are people searching for on your site and overall page views data.
- Average page session time – By looking at the average time a user spends on a page, you can analyse how engaged your audience is with your content
- Referrals – How are people finding your site? This metric allows you to see where the user came from and you can potentially use this data to see where it will be best to advertise.
When does the swap happen?
Your ‘Universal’ Analytics properties (aka your current dashboard) will stop processing data from July 1st, 2023. After this date, you’ll still be able to see your Universal reports for a period of time, but after a certain date (TBC), new data will only flow into your Google Analytics 4 property.
Should I Switch to GA4 Sooner Rather Than Later?
In short, yes.
As is the standard with Google Analytics, GA4 will start collecting data from the time of creation. It also won’t import historical data from your Universal property. Therefore, it is recommended that GA4 is implemented into your school’s digital marketing strategy as soon as possible.
So, What’s Changed
The Universal Analytics and the GA4 tools use different measuring models.
The current measurement model is based on sessions and page views. A session is the period of time that a user is active on your school’s site, so this can contain within it multiple pageviews, or eCommerce transactions.
Google Analytics 4 will aim to give the user more control and flexibility over the data that you collect about your audience. With GA4, you can record all events that the user completes. This allows you to review what users actually do on your school’s site once they’ve arrived, rather than prioritising just how they get there.
Previously, you would have had to manually set up a goal to measure valued visitor activity. In GA4, every session is logged as an event, and within them are contained parameters.
For more in depth information, see here.
As an added bonus, GA4 will give you access to the ‘analysis’ section. This section allows you to fully customise your data visualisation reporting, with features such as Exploration, Funnel Analysis and Segment overlap, which brings us nicely to our next point…
I have an app, can I integrate that into GA4?
One of the biggest benefits of the new Analytics program is that it can be used across platforms, for both websites and apps. Using various data streams in GA4, you can review and analyse, for instance, Android, iOS and web traffic.
How do I set up Google Analytics 4?
If you currently have a website hosted by Cleverbox, we are beginning to start this process for you. However, you can set up G4 Analytics yourself. In your current Google Analytics dashboard, click on your Admin section, located at the bottom left of your screen.
Underneath the ‘Account’ third of the page, you will see a dropdown arrow. Select the property you wish to add GA4 to. If you only have one account, this will already be selected.
In the ‘Property’ column, select the correct Universal Analytics property, then select the ‘GA4 Setup Assistant’ option at the top of the list.
On the next page, select the ‘I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property’, and hit ‘Create Property’.
You should also leave the ‘Enable data collection using your existing tags’ if your site uses the gtag.js. As a rule of thumb, if you set up Analytics on your site after August 2017, your site is likely tagged with gtag.js, but if it was added before August 2017, your site is likely tagged with analytics.js.
Ta-da, all done!
If you have any questions at all about the upcoming migration to Google Analytics 4, or would like some help with your school’s move to GA4, our expert team is on hand to help! Get in touch with the Cleverbox team to see how we can work together to make it a smooth transition to the future of website tracking.
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