Mall Maverick GA4 Series: Key Benefits of GA4 for your Shopping Center Marketing

The change from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 will bring some new and exciting benefits to its users. With GA4 comes more powerful measurement and analysis tools that will help to more accurately track your Shopping Mall website's analytics. 

See what we are looking forward to the most with the roll out of GA4. 

1. Improved Privacy Control

GA4 was built from the ground-up with privacy in mind. You and your users will have more intuitive and precise control over what personal data is collected, which will help you comply with current and future privacy regulations.

Google’s new approach to analytics is designed to be more flexible and adaptable to a near future where cookies will be less common and privacy will be more focused.

2. Event based tracking

One of the major changes coming with GA4 that we are very excited about is the use of event-based tracking, which provides an excellent way of tracking granular data across your web reports. Rather than relying on page views, sessions and users, GA4 will be using events and parameters as categories to measure traffic activity. Using events and parameters allows for a greater degree of customisation,  so you will have access to more detailed data for your Retail Center website’s than ever before. 

Thanks to GA4 events, basic user interactions such as outbound link clicks, scrolls or file downloads that weren’t being tracked with Universal Analytics will now be recorded automatically.

Event parameters is the additional information that is sent along with the event. All GA4 events can have specific parameters and dimensions associated with it. By default, GA4 records the following parameters with every event:

• language

• page_location

• page_referrer

• page_titlle

• screen_resolution

GA4 parameters measure page-level interactions such as page views, page loads and page URLs.

3. Focus on the user’s journey

GA4 focuses more on the journeys and events triggered by them than Universal Analytics. 

With GA4’s data stream capabilities, you can now measure the users' interactions on your website in a much more detailed way. The emphasis with GA4 is now strictly on users and their interactions, which is now captured as events rather than Universal Analytics focus on measurements that are separated by device or platform such as sessions.  

For example, a user may visit your website on their mobile device then revisit on their desktop computer and download a particular file. GA4 gives you the tools needed to track and combine these user journeys together more accurately. 

4. Enhanced data visualization capabilities

GA4 has far better data visualization capabilities than Universal analytics, with a number of new visualizations and reporting functions available 

Take the example of real-time reporting: with Universal Analytics, we had the option to see real-time data but via overview, locations, traffic sources, content, events and conversion reports.

With GA4, the visualization has significantly improved and we can now get a holistic view of all the real-time data in one glance.

5. New set of metrics for more accurate engagement tracking

GA4 reporting view provides a new set of engagement metrics, such as engaged sessions or engaged rate, that can track users’ activity with your website much more accurately than the page views and bounce rate metrics used by Universal Analytics.

Stay tuned, follow us on LinkedIn HERE for more insights into the GA4 switch and to stay up to date with this critical digital marketing change with Mall Maverick!

Author: Ardalan Amiri

Biography: Ardalan is the Operations Lead/Project Manager at Mall Maverick. He has his bachelor’s in Information Technology and has worked in the technology industry for over 10 years. He has extensive knowledge of digital marketing in the Retail Industry and has helped in delivering the successful launch of over 200 Shopping Center Websites and Directory Boards. This includes Web Development, Google Analytics, SEO and training clients on becoming experts with the Mall Maverick dashboard.