Transitioning a Dealer to GA4: Get Ready Now
We’ve all heard the news: Google is retiring Universal Analytics (UA) in favor of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), a brand-new tool.
The day when Universal Analytics will stop processing new hits is soon approaching, whether your dealership has treated this move as something to figure out later or you’ve been painstakingly organizing a migration strategy for months: July 1, 2023.
We can provide your dealership with some valuable information that will help the transition go smoothly and have a beneficial effect on your company’s bottom line as founding members of the Automotive Standards Council for GA4.
Founder Member Badge for the Automotive Standards Council for GA4
Quick Summary
Although it’s easy to imagine GA4 as a modernized version of Universal Analytics, the two are very different. Before we go into great detail about how your dealership can move seamlessly, it’s critical to comprehend what those distinctions are:
Event-focused: GA4 aids your dealership in tracking events like downloads of resources or clicks on your CTA buttons. Foris represents a significant departure from UA, which bases user activity tracking on sessions.
Cross-device Compatibility: In recent years, more individuals have started to complete steps of the purchasing process for gadgets like watches, tablets, and other mobile devices. Simply put, GA4 is more able to track a person’s purchasing habits across all devices than UA, which was designed largely with desktop traffic in mind.
In addition, Privacy Proof—GA4 is more ready for the day when Google decides to stop using third-party cookies. UA depends more on these cookies.
Google provides a whole page that describes the changes you’ll see if you want to learn more about the differences between the two platforms. Now, if you want to switch between the two programs easily and learn a few tricks to make GA4 more familiar to you, keep reading.
Expand the Discussion
Numerous marketing business partners and providers, each with their own methods of operation, have an impact on your dealership. Your dealership needs to know exactly what you can expect from each of them throughout this changeover phase.
If you are unable to respond to queries like these, it would be worthwhile to have a conversation with your partners.
If not already, when does your partner intend to start utilizing GA4?
Does your partner expect any reporting inconsistencies as a result of the change?
Does your dealership need to take any specific steps to ensure a smooth transition?
Have your partners taken into account any guidelines established by automotive councils for best practices in tracking within GA4 so that you can compare all of your efforts in a comparable way to calculate your ROI consistently?
The best approach to make sure that your dealership’s analytics are all moved over to GA4 in a timely manner and that you don’t end up with reporting gaps from a rushed transition is to be aware of the game plan of your industry partners.
Quick Tip: Establish event tracking with your providers to make sure you are gathering useful data about visitors to your website. Make careful to add “Conversions” to the relevant events since “Goals” from Universal Analytics have essentially been replaced.
Calculate Your Success
Your dealership keeps track of a number of measures, and transitional times are a fantastic opportunity to evaluate your progress and determine whether you’re actually getting the desired outcomes (or even looking in the appropriate places).
What are the key objectives of your dealership, and how far along are you in attaining them? If not, is there a statistic you could start tracking (or just focus more on) that might make a difference? These types of questions can help you decide which features and capabilities you should prioritize first as you learn how to use GA4 to its fullest.
Quick Tip: When you build your data stream, make sure Enhanced Measurement is enabled. Although it ought to be the default configuration, it can be used right away to track some fundamental events like page visits and scrolling.
Getting better through practice
Your analytics page may be connected to a number of dynamic resources, such as website pages, mobile apps, social media profiles, advertising accounts, etc. It may take some time to tame all of them and build up an analytics platform that works best for your dealership.
Try to be proactive and meet the July 1st deadline if your dealership hasn’t already switched to using GA4. This will offer you some leeway to assess any issues and be able to respond appropriately. Test your data processing and reporting processes by running a few tests to make sure everything is working as it should.
Similarly to that, even after you’ve migrated your data to GA4, there’s still more to accomplish. Consider how long it took your dealership to customize your UA account according to your requirements and preferences. Most likely, it didn’t happen overnight; rather, it probably happened over time as you discovered more about what works and doesn’t work for you. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different setups as you become more acquainted with utilizing a new analytics platform to see what works best for your dealership.
Quick Tip: Connect your Google Ads account as soon as possible to GA4 to begin gathering information for the “Advertising” tab. The information on this tab about the user journey and how conversions are affected is really interesting and can be very helpful to you.
Change can be frightening, but with the correct preparation, that fear can be transformed into eager expectation. Even though we still have a few months before Universal Analytics bids us farewell, getting your dealership ready now can make the move to GA4 much simpler (and perhaps even more enjoyable).
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