On July 1st, it was finally time; the old Universal Analytics (UA) is no longer available and you can no longer back up the data. Fortunately, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is becoming an increasingly better product and many updates are releas almost every month. Especially in the last few months, many improvements have been visible. But there are still some challenges. I will update you in this article.
Of course, not everything is perfect yet, and to be honest, some of the functionality of the old Analytics was simply better. Let’s hope Google continues the trend and eventually makes GA4 as good a tool as UA.
Challenges in Google Analytics 4
Attribution
Let’s start with some minor points and bugs
For example, attribution. Google Analytics 4 has once again overhaul the attribution reports. In GA4, these reports can be found under the chapter ‘Advertising’.
Why they chose this name is pretty clear, because the focus is really on the connection with Google Ads. In itself this is not a problem, but for an Analytics tool you would expect attribution across all channels to be an important item. The current reports ‘Attribution paths’ and ‘Attribution models’ still provide good insight into this. But if you really want to get serious about attribution, then GA4 is in my opinion no longer the most suitable tool for this.
Tag diagnostics
In the Admin section, you can see the message below under ‘Configure tag settings’ that indicates that there are problems with tagging your pages. This can be an extremely useful feature that quickly alerts you if not all of your pages are tagg. whatsapp data Unfortunately, experience has shown that these messages are not always correct, so the feature is (still) pretty much unusable. Hopefully Google will fix this in the future.
Tag diagnostics in Google Analytics 4
Organic traffic bug
In June and July of 2024, there were many reports that the attribution of Google CPC and Google Organic traffic was incorrect. On certain days, the CPC traffic spontaneously dropp for Organic sessions. Google has now confirm that this was a bug and this should no longer occur for most properties. This mainly occurr in the Nome Correo electrónico Sitio web month of June. Unfortunately, the data cannot be obtain retroactively, but if you see a peak in Organic traffic in June, check whether this bug may have also occurr in your property.
What we are receiving reports of in by lists July is that from July 7th GA4 properties with Google CPC traffic are being tagg with the campaign name ‘(organic’). In some cases even for 50%. This should not be possible, because if autotagging is us, the dimension ‘campaign name’ may only be fill with the relevant campaign name from Google Ads. Google has not yet confirm this as a bug, so we will have to wait and see how this will turn out.
Also read: Where does ‘(not set)’ in GA4 reports come from and what are the solutions.
