It’s easy to look at the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) dashboards and feel completely lost. For those who don’t have a great deal of experience working with GA4 you may think the issue is you but rest assured, there is a considerable amount of angst from even the most seasoned marketers and data analysts.
There’s a great article from Roger Montti published in the June 23, 2021 edition of searchenginejournal.com that explains why there’s so much negative backlash. If you’re looking for some validation into your own misgivings, this is a must-read article.
I’ve been telling my own clients to run parallel instances of their existing GA account alongside a new GA4 property because in case you didn’t already know, GA4 doesn’t import any of your existing data. That may change but as of now, it’s not a guarantee so running both at the same time means that even if you simply ignore the new GA4 property, it’s still gathering data.
Here are some of the GA4 pain points Montti covers:
- GA4 is difficult to use.
- GA4 is so complex even seasoned data nerds require a manual to use it.
- GA4 is geared less toward general use and more toward commercial ecommerce.
- Many existing third party add-ons are no longer compatible.
Have you started using GA4? If so, what’s your opinion?
I’d be happy if they’d only offered it, but today Google is pushing this monstrosity onto everybody, I’m using Google Ads and I don’t care to track that many signals of my advertising. But I have to now because things will stop working if I don’t click around this new convoluted interface and agree to everything by default and never go there again. Ugh. They’ve lost the plot.
I’ve been using GA4 for some time now and it is a perfect example of Google “fixing” something that wasn’t broken. Reports that were easy to access in legacy GA are now either rendered unusable or simply nonexistent in GA4. For reporting, the easiest way to do it is to set up your reports that you would normally access in legacy GA in Google Data Studio rather than trying to set them up natively in GA4.
just went to read the article. so many popups on that site i would swear it’s 1999. talk about annoying and unusable, just go to that site. so bad i didn’t read the article.
I tend to use pop-up blockers for general browsing but I didn’t have any issues accessing anything at the site. There are quite a few embedded tweets and those can take some time to load since they are pulled from Twitter in real time.
Yup. Could probably not be less intuitive. Clearly “designed” (and destroyed) by a committee of marketers and salespeople.