Is Your Business Ready for GA4?

For the majority of businesses, digital marketing and customer analytics will change forever July 1, 2023. This is the day that non-premium Google Analytics customers will stop seeing data update in UI reports, and their challenge of facing the new world of digital business intelligence officially begins.

There exists a silver lining.

For most businesses, digital reporting and decisioning wasn’t rooted in a strategic plan: It came courtesy of whatever Google had populated in hundreds of default Google Analytics reports. Though GA4 provides a more modern, useful data model to measure digital business impact, Google graciously omitted most standard reporting within the new UI. Why is this a good thing? Leaders must actually answer questions long obfuscated by “this report is Google’s best practice”.

It’s a harsh reality, but it’s time we faced it together:

  • What is your data strategy?
  • What, and how, should you measure your customer behavior online?
  • What transactions and interactions are valuable?
  • What events lead to acquiring, curating, and retaining clients?
  • What must you understand about these events to grow?
  • What can measurement mean for your profit growth?
  • How does this improve the value your customers receive?

Digital analytics should have always been led by business strategy. Instead, going from ‘0’ to ‘one hundred daily reports and KPIs’ was so swift, businesses believed digital analytics excellence was about technical operations: coding, tagging, operating schematic, and so on. These are but the final details. The real work is done well before data points are collected and visualized.

By providing a worthy canvas yet no paint-by-numbers, the migration ensures that true digital data strategists will separate from their competitors even faster than before.

You might think you just need GA4 configured before next July, but I bet what you really need is a data strategy. I’m proud that at Bonsai you get both.

About the Author

Matt Butler
Ex-Googler of 12 years, Matt was a founding member of Google’s analytical consulting team, developing analytics, statistical forecasting, auction modeling, and machine learning for companies such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Kohl’s, Best Buy, and many more. He went on to lead global technical partnerships before leaving to found Bonsai in February, 2020.