As you’re no doubt aware, the previous version of Google Analytics, known as Universal Analytics (UA), will stop working on July 31, 2023. It is being replaced with an all-new version called Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The primary difference between the two versions of this widely used analytics tool is that the new GA4 is an event-based system, meaning that its data model is built around events and properties, rather than pageviews and sessions.
The biggest impact of this change on you – a website owner – is that you need to retool how events are captured in your website from the ground up; the old way of tracking events in UA (event category, action, label) is incompatible with GA4 (event name and properties). For websites that track many events (which should be all websites, given the great importance for effective analytics, conversion optimization, customer retention, personalization, etc.), this change imposes quite a burden.
Event Tracking for GA4 can be a Heavy Burden
Manually instrumenting on-page events (such as clicks on buttons or images) using GA4 tracking code or Google Tag Manager can be difficult, time-consuming, expensive and unreliable over time. Using the manual approach, event tracking tends to break. Importantly, most companies never come close to capturing all the events and event properties, potentially leaving out key data required for critical insight-generation, decision-making and marketing efforts.
Whether tracking events with GA4’s gtag(); JavaScript code or Google Tag Manager event tagging (using tags, triggers and variables), you will need to invest significant time and resources – including the involvement of technical people – to get it set up, tested and maintained. This is especially so, given the importance of including rich property data along with most tracked events (highly valuable analytics can only be obtained when your event data contains rich property information as well).
Something else to be aware of is that GA4’s event tracking is not “retroactive,” meaning that you can never go back to analyze visitor interactions for an action that you didn’t already choose to track manually. If you want to start tracking a user action for the first time, you need to code/tag it and then wait days or weeks until you have enough data to analyze. Since you’re never going to track every visitor event (and property) manually, this means that you will always have missing data that you might want to suddenly analyze.
Furthermore, ongoing event tracking maintenance is required: when your website changes, you need to make sure that your tracking codes, CSS selectors and/or tag manager definitions are updated to properly collect all the necessary events. Otherwise, reports and funnels simply stop working.
Most small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses simply don’t have the manpower or budget to implement the kind of manual event tracking that they need to get the most value out of GA4 (or any other analytics platform).
Let Our AI Do the Heavy Lifting for You
Now, you can get all your website events into GA4, effortlessly! Convizit’s AI-driven solution automatically captures every visitor action in your website, enriches the event data with relevant on-page properties, and delivers this rich, named and structured behavioral data directly into GA4. You will be able to focus on understanding user behavior and improving your website’s user experience (UX), without any of the well-known event tracking headaches.
Convizit is a “data as a service” solution focused exclusively on the intelligent, automatic collection and preparation of visitor event data. Convizit deploys within minutes and begins streaming complete, property-enriched visitor event data into GA4 within days – with no need for you to plan, select, code, name or tag the events to track.
With Convizit’s unparalleled behavioral datasets fueling Google Analytics 4, you will dramatically enhance your ability to deeply understand how people are using your website. With in-depth reporting and analysis of user behavior and the resulting insights, you will be well-equipped to improve your website’s UX, your marketing and your business KPIs.
Choosing Convizit’s AI-driven auto-track technology to automate your event data collection is a much smarter and faster approach than the manual methods Google offers you.
How it Works
Just add Convizit’s lightweight code snippet (JavaScript tag) to your website, and rich visitor event data is on its way into GA4, effortlessly.
- Convizit intelligently captures all visitor activity and learns the site using AI models.
- Named, property-enriched event data is streamed to GA4.
- You can easily choose which events to receive, and adjust their names and properties.
- Convizit’s AI handles ongoing website changes intelligently and automatically.
Summary of Benefits for Website Owners
- Super-fast time-to-value – Start getting high value from GA4 in days instead of weeks or months.
- Complete, rich event data – Every user event is automatically captured and enriched with relevant on-page properties, enabling highly valuable advanced GA4 reporting and analytics.
- No need for developers or other technical people – Easily customize how events and properties are delivered, without relying on developers or manual tagging efforts.
- Back-fill historical event data – Choose additional events to analyze at any time, and receive historical data into GA4, back to the day you deployed Convizit.
- Reliable data with zero maintenance – Convizit’s automatic tracking continuity capability prevents lost data or broken funnels when your website changes.
Try Convizit for Free
You do still have a few months to switch over to GA4 before UA stops collecting data from your website, but why wait until the last minute? In fact, Google recommends running both in parallel for a while to make sure that your GA4 deployment is working as expected before leaving UA behind.
To make this as easy as possible, we are now offering a free trial of our AI-driven event capture solution to anyone interested in trying it with Google Analytics 4. Let Convizit begin sending your website’s event data into GA4 for free, with no risk or commitment on your part. There is no faster or easier way to get up and running with GA4.
Click here to schedule a one-on-one demo with me. I will be happy to show you how it works, answer your questions and get you started.
