Early poll results: ‘Kicking and screaming’ about GA4

In less than a day we’ve gotten hundreds of responses to our question about Google Analytics 4 readiness. And, oh my, are there strong feelings.

It’s been less than a day since our poll about your Google Analytics 4 readiness went live and we’ve already gotten hundreds of responses. We will do a full report when the poll closes, but the early results — and comments — are very illuminating.

Let us know: Are you ready for Google Analytics 4? Have your say in our poll

The top line of what we’ve found out so far:

More than twice as many people say they are still learning how to use GA4 than say it’s all set up and being used. 

People hate the UI. That is mentioned more often than anything else in the comments.  “I hate the new interface, I do not think it is intuitive at all.”

A lot of unhappiness with reports (“I find that simple and basic reports are not already available.”), the learning curve (“Learning has been difficult. Training sources are few and not easy to follow.”) and the inability to annotate (“Why, oh why, can we not annotate!!!!?”)

Here’s a sample of comments — positive, mixed and negative — we’ve gotten from you. They’ve been edited for clarity and length when needed.

Positive  

“GA4 does have a sleek new interface and I do love the new site metrics such as average engagement time per second and engaged sessions. Engaged sessions also is more telling than bounce rate as it gives more insight for example if over 50% engaged sessions rather than 80% or 90% bounce rate for example.”

“It’s good because now the SEOs are using their brains to analyze the data. Plus the tracking in GA4 is amazing.”

“Although it took a bit to understand at first, our team actually found GA4 to be better than Universal Analytics, because it focuses on events over a mass conglomerate of complex data with no meaning. We’ve migrated all our clients to GA4 and they’ve all been pleased with the new setup.”

Mixed

“In time, I think GA4 will enable greater insights than UA did. With that said, some of the seemingly arbitrary changes to how reporting can be done are frustrating. Eliminating Views, restrictions around how custom segments can be used, and other seemingly unnecessary changes are going to make life difficult for us once UA is really gone.”

“I have mixed feelings about GA4. I like the search feature. However, I find that simple and basic reports are not already available. Not to mention the loss of time on site conversion tracking and the change in calculations in our Buy to Detail Rate and Cart to Detail Rate KPIs.”

“It’s an app analytics tool that’s been shoehorned into web analytics. It’s getting better, they’ve added quite a bit more web metrics in the last little bit, and you can now create a decent approximation of the traditional GA traffic and content reports if you use Looker Studio.”

“The enhanced flexibility with GA4 is great but makes it much more difficult to navigate.”

“The events tracking, custom report and collection creation — next-generation leaps forward for GA4. Only wish GA4 had automated email report delivery (like UA has). Fingers crossed that it will soon be added.”

Negative

“It is the Windows Vista of Google Analytics.”

“It’s not that the masses aren’t ready for GA4, it’s that GA4 isn’t ready for the masses. The UI is terrible, often requiring you to rebuild reports instead of saving them. Plus it’s extremely difficult to isolate traffic volume by individual channel — even more difficult to compare channels YoY even though we set up GA4 nearly 2 years ago! It’s a hot mess.”

“GA4 is not an analytics tool anymore, it’s just a poor reporting tool that offers none of the interesting features Universal Analytics had. We were supposed to work more efficiently. Now we lose a huge amount of time and need consulting budget to create what was standard before.”

“It’s a pain, and while it’s free, the downgrade for our marketer leaders on the basics usage means we all have to learn what GA thinks is the ‘right’ way before we finalize our work to just pull the data out instead.”

“If it weren’t for the integration with other Google marketing products, specifically Ads and Optimize, our case for moving to another platform would have been much, much stronger – and now that Optimize is also going away…”

“I haven’t heard of any major benefits to switching over so as of now we are approaching July 1 kicking and screaming.”

We will have more for you about this soon, so stay tuned.

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About the author

Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.

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