Adoption has been slow

Google Analytics has dominated the measurement market, with around 80% market share (source) as of April 2022. Forcing the upgrade to GA4 which in many cases requires additional setup and training, makes it difficult to imagine that Google be successful in retaining every user. Competitor platforms like Adobe Experience Cloud, Pwik, and KissMetrics all saw spikes in interest since Google announced the change.

Across the industry, articles stating that GA4 “sucks” and “is horrible” (source) probably don’t help to make marketers excited about the transition, with sentiment towards the mandatory update being generally negative. Despite this, it’s likely that GA4 will remain the web analytics tool of choice for many, given familiarity and interoperability with other Google products. 

Beware that if you’re just tackling this issue now, your useful GA4 data will also start now. The key point being that making a Jan 2024 vs. Jan 2023 comparison in a recently set up GA4 account will yield a disappointing lack of data. Solutions vary, but data warehousing, simple but rudimentary exporting of KPIs, and taking the opportunity to clean break and ‘just start from scratch’ are among the solutions.  

On top of this, GA4 is adequately different to UA to warrant marketers needing additional training to perform basic functionality within the platform. With the ongoing availability of UA, marketers are also delaying learning GA4, leaving few keen to push for its implementation.

Google makes the change easier, slowly.

While the announcement came as a surprise to many, Google did give a fairly long runway of sixteen months to process and implement the required changes.

That hasn’t stopped many marketers putting off the implementation. Likely in recognition of this low adoption, Google have made the process slightly easier with tools to aid the change including a Migration Assistant, and better parity of UA and GA4 features.

Several features previously missing from GA4 have recently been implemented, smoothing over some of the more difficult gaps. In December, the much-requested landing page report was added, along with views per session, and session duration; all cornerstone metrics of UA.  

In that month Google also released the GA4 Migrator for UA (source), though those hoping for a one-click solution were disappointed. The tool uses Google Sheets to bridge the data, and requires substantial input.