🔎 GA4lure

Let’s get deep here people.

I understand that I must welcome change. The world is changing and I either must adapt or die.

That being said, change must only be accepted if it’s truly a part of the future…which I’m not sure GA4 will be.

GA4 = Google Analytics 4

This was Google’s newest Analytics product...their first in over almost a decade. It fell with a thud as marketers all across the internet said it was ‘mid’ initially.

I assumed that it was many of those who are resistant to change. We as humans don’t like change…especially in something that we’ve gotten used to.

(Remember when Wendy’s changed their french fries?)

But then, I started using it more and more. I’ve realized over the past few months that those experts were right. And it wasn’t just ‘mid’…it was straight up ‘bad’.

Now, I’m forced to educate myself on how to get old reports in the new GA4 (spoiler: sometimes you can’t) and am leaning heavily on resources being made by others on YouTube.

However, each wrong YouTube video just reminds how easy it used to be.

Why would Google need to “upgrade” Analytics? Their answer is that it had been almost a decade since their last one, and that was for a web that was vastly different than the one now (fair).

While the traffic of the internet changed (from desktop to mobile), the people tracking that traffic didn’t change much at all.

For the most part, it’s still mostly digital marketers and small business owners using Google Analytics. And, as constituted, GA4 is doing no favors to those people who use it most often.

GA4 seems to have been built with the big business data analyst in mind. The problem is, that’s a relatively small percentage of people who actually use Analytics.

Unless you’re managing a lot of data (spoiler: most small businesses are not), GA4 offers you a more limited product with a much higher barrier to entry.

What was nice about the old Google Analytics was that even though it was an “advanced” website tool, it could still be used by amateurs and hobbyists.

If you really wanted to dive deep, you could. And if you couldn’t on your own, an Analytics professional could be paid a fair amount to help you out.

In short, it was complicated, but not too complicated.

This week, I was attempting to exclude a URL parameter from Google Analytics.

One of the hot landing pages for a website I work with isn’t relevant to the rest of their website. The client wants it excluded to see how the rest of the website is performing without that hot landing page.

This used to be an easy enough task. However, GA4 wants to make your life hell.

Instead of a 2-minute YouTube tutorial like it used to be, the new process for excluding a URL parameter is a 13-minute YouTube video. Even worse, the feature is not even built into GA anymore. Instead, I have to use the Google Tag Manager.

I fear the new platform is attempting to phase out those small business owners who manage their own Analytics. They are instead trying to make Analytics a marketing professional’s game…one’s that can charge exorbitant amounts for their services, since now no layman can figure out to manage it without hours of training.

And even still, marketing professionals right now are struggling with all the new features and changes.

So at the end of the day, GA4 is actually built for nobody.

With things like AI, I’m in the ‘adapt or die’ camp. However, with GA4, I’m much more in the ‘die’ camp.

What do you think of GA4? Am I once again being a dramatic baby? Would love to hear your thoughts!