Integration: Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and AdFixus

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google's web analytics platform, designed to provide a more comprehensive and future-focused approach to understanding user behavior across websites and apps. It's an evolution from the previously dominant Universal Analytics.

Here are some key features and aspects of Google Analytics 4:

• Event-Centric Model: GA4 operates on an event-driven model, emphasizing events as fundamental units of data collection. Events encompass various user interactions such as pageviews, clicks, video views, downloads, and more. This model offers greater flexibility in tracking user interactions beyond just pageviews.
• Machine Learning and AI Integration: GA4 leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide predictive insights, automated insights, and alerts. This helps in forecasting user behavior and understanding trends more efficiently.
• Cross-Platform Tracking: It enables tracking of user behavior across both websites and mobile apps in a more unified manner, providing a better understanding of the user journey across different platforms.
• Enhanced User Privacy: GA4 is designed with increased user privacy in mind, aligning with evolving privacy regulations. It allows for more granular control over data collection and emphasizes the use of aggregated and anonymized data for analysis.
• Focus on Customer Lifecycle: GA4 emphasizes understanding the complete customer lifecycle, from acquisition to conversion and retention. This involves insights into user engagement, churn prediction, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Reporting and Analysis: The reporting interface has been revamped to provide more customizable, intuitive, and real-time insights. It includes a more streamlined interface and better integration with Google's machine learning capabilities for predictive analytics.

Google Analytics 4 represents a shift towards a more holistic approach to data analytics, catering to the changing landscape of online user behavior and privacy concerns. It aims to offer a more comprehensive understanding of user interactions across various platforms while providing more advanced analytics and insights.

Why you should integrate Google Analytics with AdFixus:

1. Reduce ID bloat – we recommend removing other IDs and using AdFixus ID as the common denominator. GA ID service will continually re-sync IDs that are created by the various browsers, whereas AdFixus IDs are persistent for a rolling 12 months across all browsers.

2. Improve granularity of Safari visitor tracking - with AdFixus you can reclaim visibility across all browser signals.

3. Report on user journeys over time without cookie expiry restrictions – the AdFixus ID is durable and doesn’t suffer from the auto-renew cookie policies from browsers

4. Improve cross-domain visibility – AdFixus can uniquely identify your users across domains. Yes, this is possible via GA but is limited by session and cookie refresh. AdFixus can sync users across domains without the time limitation and to all domains without a number limitation.

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How can I integrate GA4 with the AdFixus platform  

1. Include all top-level domains in your GA cross-domain tracking configuration.  

2. Include the AdFixus ID as a custom dimension into GA4 and setup side-by-side comparison reporting with AdFixus ID vs. non-AdFixus ID to measure improvement over time. This can be modelled further in BigQuery using the GA4 connector

3. Replace the default GA Cookie ID with your AdFixus ID. Our solution engineering team have developed standardised patterns to enable this for various GA setups and can assist you in setting this up.  

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