SIDRA

Welcome to the first blog post of Marketing Bites – a collection of short, easy-to-consume blog posts about all things marketing. The root of our topic today is web analytics.

You may have heard by now of the phasing out of cookies. Don’t worry though, this isn’t about the dessert (what kind of world would we live in without those cookies??), but about the web analytics tool.

Web analytics is the data from users that visit your website. They track metrics such as total visitors and unique visitors to your site, session time (how long someone spends on your site), and how many pages on your site users visit.

Web analytics give us insight into what kind of people are accessing our website (whether or not the average user falls within our target market) and allows us to tweak our pages and overall site to better-serve our target market (and hopefully convert those visitors into customers).

We are witnessing yet another turning point in technology and, in turn, marketing. People value their privacy and, with the internet and technology becoming more nuanced, we are learning how to better-protect users’ privacy. Browsers have steadily been phasing out third-party cookies – the typical web analytics tool that tracks users across sites.

With the shift away from cookies already upon us, Google launched their new web analytics tool, GA4 in July 2023. The biggest update to GA4 that its predecessor, Universal Analytics (UA), lacks is that GA4 has tools to help fill in the gaps for users that decline being tracked.

GA4’s use of machine learning (ML) to predict what the gaps in traffic are when users decline to consent to sharing their data will help marketers more accurately identify what marketing efforts produce the highest return on investment (ROI). Metrics that are available with GA4 that UA didn’t offer include purchase probability, churn probability, and predicted revenue (GA4 Predictive Metrics).

We are leaving the Age of Precision for the Age of Projection as our artificial intelligence and machine learning technology continues to improve, and we will only see better projection tools in our future.