Google Analytics reigns as the preeminent, widely accessible data analysis service provided by Google, serving as a cornerstone for marketing strategies. The introduction of GA4 in October 2020—Google Analytics' latest iteration, succeeding Universal Analytics (UA)—has left marketers worldwide in a quandary, especially with UA's discontinuation in July 2023. This transition emphasized the necessity of mastering GA4 setup and utilization. This guide will demystify GA4's key updates, its benefits for e-commerce platforms, and how to circumvent its complex setup to efficiently harvest metrics for your Shopify store.
How is GA4 different from universal analytics?
GA4 introduces two pivotal changes. Firstly, it treats all user interactions as "events," a unique data collection approach exclusive to GA4. This encompasses actions like webpage visits, button clicks, and scrolling, allowing for an integrated tracking of web and app activities. Secondly, GA4 enhances e-commerce tracking capabilities, although adapting to the new event-based tracking system poses challenges.
Benefits of GA4 for E-commerce
- Analyzing sales factors at a glance. You can identify which sources/media generated sales in your online store.
- Ease of understanding customer acquisition and shopping journey. You can track the visitors, drop-offs, checkouts, orders at each stage of the funnel.
- Grasping sales by product. You can easily examine detailed sales data and sales trends through graphs.
- Predicting products with a high probability of purchase. Using predictive metrics, you can determine purchase probability, churn probability, and predicted revenue.
- Generating targets for each user stage. You can segment buyers into different stages and execute advertisements tailored to their characteristics.
A GA4 Alternative for Shopify Store Analytics
The complexity of setting up GA4—ranging from event addition, script installation, to navigation analysis configuration—presents a steep learning curve. Datarize emerges as a seamless solution, offering e-commerce functionality without the hassle.
Datarize simplifies access to GA4's e-commerce data features through a few clicks in the Shopify App Store, integrating scripts and metadata effortlessly. Specifically, its metadata integration promises a quick, five-minute setup, unlocking the ability to immediately analyze key growth metrics, predict purchase and dropout probabilities, and launch targeted campaigns.
Leveraging Datarize as a GA4 Alternative for E-commerce Data Analysis
Datarize's suite includes campaign statistics, funnels, acquisition, and product conversion insights. Let's explore practical applications:
1. "Acquisition" Analysis for Sales Insight
Based on the purchase conversion rate, you can see the efficiency by source/media. You can focus more on sources with relatively higher purchase conversion rate, or on modifying ad targets for media with low conversion rates. Datarize automatically inputs UTM when executing campaigns, allowing source/media management without any additional work.
2. "Funnel Analytics" for Customer Journey Mapping
You can visually understand the shopping journey from visit to product view to purchase attempt to completion. By using the funnel chart, even without GA4 setup, you can see the conversion rate at each step. Analyzing the causes of low conversion rates at certain stages and finding improvement methods can help increase the purchase conversion rate. Datarize also provides conversion rate benchmarks compared to the market, allowing you to infer objective performance. (Learn more about how to use the funnel chart)
3. Product Sales and Feedback Through "Product Data"
"Product Data" provides data such as impressions, click-through rates, purchase conversion rates, views, clicks, purchases, and revenue for each product, allowing you to identify products with the best customer responses. You can plan promotional actions, such as discount promotions for popular products or sending product recommendation messages to abandoned customers, to encourage purchases. Additionally, using impressions, which greatly influence product sales, as a basis, you can plan product promotion. At this time, you can also use the recommended products from "High-Relevance Products for Purchase." By displaying or sending messages about products that are frequently purchased together, you can increase the purchase conversion rate.
Beyond Analysis: Taking Action with Data
Ultimately, data analysis is necessary to find improvements and determine marketing actions. Datarize not only provides data analysis capabilities offered with GA4 setup but also allows you to execute automated marketing campaigns. You can generate targets based on customer characteristics and automatically execute campaigns, such as sending messages recommending the most likely products to be purchased or sending discount coupons. With Datarize, you can take action while analyzing, making it more practical than GA4.
In conclusion, quantitative metrics can provide insights and become the competitiveness of our online stores. Datarize can be a starting point to make quantitative metric analysis, which is considered difficult due to the complexity of GA4 setup, a little easier. By using numbers to find the next "what we should do" and taking action, we can grow our business.
