‘Sucker punch to the gut’
The marketing industry as a whole experienced a similar collective freakout in 2020, when Google gave a two-year heads-up on the end of third-party cookies. Unlike the Chrome third-party cookie deadline, however, which has been delayed, Google really is going to get rid of Universal Analytics and default all marketers to GA4 by July next year.
And, also unlike the third-party cookie phaseout, marketers are largely unaware of how seriously these analytics changes will affect their business and are far behind where they need to be in the transition.
“When I’m talking to clients, there’s a lot of confusion,” said Chris Tatum, head of SEO at the performance agency Within. “They’re asking, ‘Why is this happening?’”
Kirk Williams, founder and CEO of Zato, a paid search consultancy that works with small businesses, said he would describe the initial news of UA’s demise as “a sucker punch to the gut.”
Even so, GA4 is a far more workable solution than meets the eye, Williams said.
It’s such a difficult transition because, unlike other Google Analytics upgrades, when features change or the UI is somewhat altered, the switch to GA4 is a complete structural overhaul. There are no apples-to-apples comparisons between the Universal Analytics and GA4 reporting data sets.
“There are a lot of companies and a lot of agencies that are not talking about this change, which is way more negative than any of the changes that actually come from GA4,” Tatum said.
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