What Are We Doing With GA4 in 2023?
Update: 3/9/23 status update at the end.
What Is GA4?
- Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is a new version of Google Analytics. It will completely replace the current form of analytics (Referred to as “Universal Analytics” and its existence was driven by Google’s need to further user privacy for legal reasons. Traffic will still be traffic, but the ways in which that traffic is viewed has switched considerably. Previously, Analytics viewed traffic by Pageview and Session. GA4 now reframes traffic to view it by event. Goals are being eliminated in favor of Conversion Events (Events tagged manually as conversion events). In some ways, GA4 will be less granular than its predecessor and is still evolving. GA4, by itself, only holds a maximum of 14 months of critical data, allowing a maximum of 2 months YoY during measurement.
When Does It Replace UA?
-Universal Analytics, or Google Analytics 3, will be discontinued for most accounts as of July 1, 2023. All dealers should have a GA4 account by that date, and Wikimotive is ensuring its clients already have one. Setup of events and, therefore, conversion events will be another matter entirely and will be slow to develop due to their dependence on many vendors to configure.
Rollout
-If you’re a client, we’ve made you a GA4, so it’s collecting data, or we confirmed you already have one.
-Events are signals that happen on your website and depend on your website vendor and tool vendors to configure properly. Goals are no longer, but Conversions will be their near-equivalent.
-Vendors who have committed to modernizing events are planning rollouts over Q1, Q2, and beyond. The GA4 standards under the Automotive Standards Counsel (ASC) are the gold standard, but not all vendors will follow it or release guidance on their events standards.
-Participating vendors should be using the ASC standard as of January 1 and labeling their events accordingly. Many of those vendors have already missed their commitment to fire Automotive Standards Council Events on January 1, 2023, and are now projecting later dates.
-Based on what we know, we, unfortunately, expect slow and haphazard progress on events. The onus for these will be on each technology vendor, and many vendors will need to be independently challenged by their dealers in volume before they will react.
-We are beginning formal testing with a limited number of Wikimotive clients in January as vendors begin implementing the new standard. Testing will continue through Q2 as this new landscape comes into focus.
-We fully expect that the majority of automotive vendors will not follow the well-defined standard that has been crafted or will be slow to do so. We will make efforts to interpret non-standard GA4 events after we have a handle on events that follow the standard.
-Curation of non-standard conversion events will be a moving target just like it has been with Goals in GA3, and things like an i-framed Xtime service scheduler still may not fire conversion events if you use it. This rests on the tools vendor’s cooperation and the underlying technology of the tool itself.
-Please be patient with us as we develop new internal standards for GA4. Rest assured that we are actively staying at the forefront of this topic, and the whole industry is in a state of “we don’t know what we don’t know” as of Q1 2023.
Update: 3/9/23
ASC Events — Adoption of, and adherence to the ASC standard continues to develop across the industry. Major website vendors range in status from “almost 100%” with Dealer eProcess (who are working very hard to advance their status), to murky details and aiming for July with Dealer.com. Overall, the website vendors vary significantly in status from one to the next, but the status is even more scattered with tool vendors such as chat. Progress is being made, industry-wide, but your mileage may vary greatly by your vendor mix.
GA4 Data Connections — Setting up a GA4 and adding the necessary tag to a website will feed traffic and behavior information into your GA4. In order to receive ASC events, the website vendor must also set up a data stream to be sent to your GA4 number. This is an additional step that we are taking for all Wikimotive clients and completion will hinge on website vendor cooperation. So far we have encountered [only] one website vendor who refused the request, stating: “We label our own GA4 With ASC events and conversions to be compliant. Any other GA4 Set up (From a 3rd party or clients second GA account) would not have that done to it – it’s part of our competitive advantage.” (Italics added for emphasis). This highlights that vendors are already trying to leverage this for their own benefit, rather than the benefit of the dealers they/we serve. Look out for instances of this, and our recommendation is always to select a new vendor if you encounter this.