WhatsApp and Google Analytics: UA to GA4, WhatsApp analytics, charles tracking...

Google Analytics changed from UA to GA4 on July 1. What does this mean for marketers? Should you care? How does it affect your WhatsApp tracking in charles? How does WhatsApp tracking work anyway?

Most eCommerce marketers in 2023 have a Google Analytics (GA) account. While there are some alternatives, GA remains the most popular analytics tool in the world. In fact of the websites that use tracking analytics, 86% of them use Google Analytics.

This is why, when Google announces changes, marketers sit up and listen.

Until now, marketers have been using the version of Google Analytics called "Universal Analytics" (UA). On July 1, 2023, it changed to a new version, "Google Analytics 4" (GA4).

We want to help you understand what you need to think about – if anything – since this change. And understand. In this article, we look at:

What is Google Analytics?

How to migrate from UA to GA4

What changes from UA to GA4

How this impacts tracking in general

How this impacts tracking with WhatsApp

How best to track your sales in WhatsApp

How charles helps you with WhatsApp tracking

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free service from Google that enables companies to track statistics like website visitors, bounce rate and more.

Google Analytics helps businesses understand how well their campaigns, designs and text are working, so they can continue to optimize and improve results. And it helps marketers understand which channels, keywords, webpages and campaigns are performing best.

How to migrate from UA to GA4

You'll find a [UA→GA4] Migration guide for beginners blog post here from Google and you can follow a series of YouTube videos made by Google here. 

Not sure if you have UA or GA4? Here's how to check. But if you created your analytics property before October 14, 2020, it's likely you have UA. If you created it afterwards, it's likely you already have GA4.

Typie, the charles WhatsApp expertTypie's tip: Do you use the charles platform? Once you've migrated to GA4 in Google, you can then follow these 3 easy steps to make the switch in our platform.

Changes from Google UA to GA4

In 2019, Google introduced Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to "address evolving measurement standards and help businesses succeed."

GA4 was designed to enable "businesses to see unified user journeys across their websites and apps, use Google's machine learning technology to surface and predict new insights, and most importantly, to keep up with a changing ecosystem."

After phasing it in for several years, on July 1, 2023, Google replaced its legacy system, Universal Analytics (UA), with GA4.

From this date, Google stopped processing analytics through UA. So if you haven't logged in to your Google Analytics account yet, you'll be greeted with this message: “This property stopped processing data starting on July 1, 2023. To continue measuring website traffic, create a new Google Analytics 4 ( GA4) property.”

What's new in GA4?

So what exactly has changed from UA to GA4? Here's a quick summary:

THE KEY DIFFERENCE: It helps you understand more of the customer lifecycle: using an event-based model, GA4 can track user journeys across your website, apps (including WhatsApp) and even offline interactions. So it analyzes more than just your website for a more complete picture

Also:

It's built on business goals: UA was designed to track numbers so you can interpret them. GA is designed with key business objectives in mind, "like driving sales or app installs, generating leads or connecting online and offline customer engagement"

It has machine learning at its core: so has even more accurate analytics

It doesn't rely on cookies: it works with and without cookies (because people often say "no" to being tracked by cookies, results with UA can be up to 30% lower than in reality) 

It has improved privacy: according to Google: "to support new privacy-preserving technologies, GA4 is built with AI-powered solutions, such as behavioral and conversion modeling. These solutions give you a complete view of performance without compromising user privacy, but they 're not available in UA properties."

It measures "events" not "hits"