With the new release of Google Analytics 4, Google is shifting the way marketing analysts view and orchestrate their use of Google Cloud Computing products, including BigQuery and the Google Marketing Platform.

As you think about your data infrastructure, you’ll need to start mapping how data flows into your reports. We also recommend you create a strategic data management plan, like a digital measurement model, to identify gaps in your existing martech stack and opportunities to ensure you’re tracking the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business. Additionally, you’ll want to start leveraging more of Google's Data Analytics products.

Historically, Google Analytics was seen as the all-in-one tool used for data collection, analysis, and reporting. However, Google Analytics is returning to its roots to simplify its product and integrate with other, more advanced Google products, which are designed to augment the way marketers analyze their customer data. 

If your business primarily uses Google products, we recommend these tools as the core of your analytics tech stack:

1. Google Tag Manager (GTM): GTM makes it easier to manage event tracking on your site, without the need of a developer. As a best practice, every site manager should deploy their Google Analytics property tracking code and custom event tracking via GTM. This product serves as the foundation for your website analytics infrastructure and requires technical know-how to implement.
2. Google Analytics 4 (GA4): GA4 tracks and reports your web or app traffic to better understand your customer journey. This is where you should actually be conducting your business intelligence analysis via ad hoc segmentation to answer specific activity-based or user behavior questions. Those using the previous version of Google Analytics, known as Universal Analytics (UA) or GA3,  should aim to migrate to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible since Google will sunset all UA properties in 2023.
3. Google BigQuery: BigQuery is a cloud-based data warehouse that allows you to run SQL-like queries on raw data sets from data collection tools, like GA4. One of the many new perks of deploying a GA4 property is that you benefit from a license-free export to BigQuery. In short, you can take a deeper dive into your data sets with BigQuery and run filtered analysis for better, more advanced insights. 
4. Google Data Studio (GDS): GDS is a free, cloud-based dashboarding software that allows you to easily create custom, user-friendly data visualizations and reports. If you’re already using GA4, you may have noticed that “Views” are no longer present in the Google Analytics interface. Google intentionally removed Views from GA4, because Google wants analysts to run their filtered reports in a dedicated data visualization tool, like GDS. GDS comes equipped with numerous data connectors, making it easy to integrate and consolidate your data sources into one dashboarding platform, to create a single source of truth for key stakeholders who need to draw actionable insights from this data. 

The biggest takeaway here is that Google no longer wants you to rely solely on Google Analytics for your data collection, analysis, and reporting needs. As you may have guessed, Google wants everyone to take full advantage of their growing capabilities and use a combination of Google products, including GA4, GTM, and GDS. This strategy will give you the most flexibility in your data workflow and will set you up for success as you scale your digital analytics operations.

The good news here is that all of these products are entirely free to use; however, they do require a fair bit of technical acumen to optimally configure them to scale with your business. If you do not have a dedicated, in-house team to help you architect your data infrastructure, the Phase2 team can help set you up for success. 

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