A bit of shameless self-promotion here: I have a new class up on Pluralsight, training (formerly) ordinary people in the arcane knowledge needed to become a (wait for it!): CREATIVE DATA SCIENTIST!! It’s called Google Analytics 4 Fundamentals.
Yep, this is a new class about the sea-change coming to the analytics space.
For the uninitiated, what has happened is that Google has forced-marched everyone from their flagship Google Analytics platform to what is now colloquially known as “GA4” in an attempt to measure not just user metrics on the “Open Internet,” but also from the burgeoning spheres of mobile apps, online gaming, connected TVs, streaming music devices, and so very much more.
If you’ve been skating along with Google Analytics up ’til now, yeah, you’re gonna hafta change the code implementation.
The good news? Google has made it really easy to swap out the old .js code for the new one.
The bad news? Welp. This iteration of Google Analytics has been designed with an entirely different mission in mind. Why?
The roots of Google Analytics are in a technology known as “Urchin,” which was built way back when we were all still connected with 56K modems via AOL, and poking around on janky web pages with dancing GIFs and tinny 8-bit MIDI music.
Those days are long gone. Instead, web users are coming at sites and content from all manner of devices, in all manner of contexts, and all of it needs to be accurately. measured. Why?
Because Google wants to sell its ads against said content on said platforms, and needs to give the advertisers proof that what they bought actually resulted in sales.
All is not lost, however. One of the things that Google has made a LOT easier is to track what your users are doing on your e-commerce site, particularly when it comes to the sales funnel & checkout process.
I used to have to tediously, manually “wire up” each stage of this sales funnel by custom-coding JavaScript to fire off data to the datalayer to track what users were doing.
Now? It’s all pre-rolled, right out of the (virtual) box.
Check out the class and let me know what you think!