As we are just over a year out from when Google has announced they will end-of-life Universal Analytics as of July 1, 2023, this month’s meetup included a bonus follow-on seminar on Thursday morning.

Ken Williams (creator and maintainer of in-depth Google Analytics 4 resources on ken-williams.com) and Cory Watson from Search Discovery presented at both events. Some of the highlights and takeaways from the event:

• The entire philosophy of how the collected data is structured is different from Universal Analytics—it relies solely on events, and each event can have multiple parameters (as Cory put it, “the event is what happened, and the parameters are the context around that”)
• This model does have more flexibility, but it’s still got some gaps in its functionality; mostly, these are things that Google is working on
• Bounce rate was going away…to be replaced by a vastly superior concept of “engagement.” This was awesome…but there was a backlash from a sufficiently large number of users (who should really be ashamed of themselves) that Google is going to add bounce rate back in as an available metric
• Planning is key: actually accessing the data once it’s captured will be reasonably straightforward or an absolute nightmare depending on how well the implementation is planned. Ken and Cory suggested that organizations should plan for 11 to 17 weeks to implement Google Analytics 4
• Something to think (freak out) about is that lots of organizations expect to have access to year-over-year comparisons. That means, starting July 1, 2023, they’ll be wanting apples-to-apples comparison data that goes back to…July 1, 2022. <gulp>

This post can’t possibly do a complete recap of the material. You really had to be there.

But, if you weren’t (or, if you were, but you’d like to review the content), the next best thing are the slides, which Ken and Cory graciously shared!

The slides from Wednesday’s meetup:

The slides from Thursday’s seminar:

And, hey, just in case you wanted to see a few more pics of the event: