Build trust and grow your business with content marketing: TREW Marketing

TREW Marketing partners with clients, diving in deep to understand your business goals and then creating marketing plans to support them. From brand positioning and messaging that clearly defines and differentiates your organization to strong, user-friendly websites and a steady, strategic stream of lead-generating content, we help prospects easily find and learn from you, ultimately building trust in your brand and growing leads to impact your bottom line.

Big changes are on the horizon. Google's powerful Universal Analytics (UA) platform, the number one tool used to track website performance, is set to be retired later this year. If you’ve been tracking your engineering company's website traffic through Google's Universal Analytics, it's time to familiarize yourself with Google’s latest release, Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Q. What is GA4?

Google Analytics 4, dubbed the next generation of analytics, is a service that enables you to measure traffic and engagement across your websites and apps.

Do not to consider GA4 an “upgrade” or “new” version of Universal Analytics. This version of Google Analytics utilizes a different data model to track users and their behavior on your website. 

Since Google is choosing to measure visitor behavior differently in GA4, it's nearly impossible to compare data from the two platforms. While each platform measures users and sessions, if you compare data from the same timeframe, you will come up with completely different values. 

Measuring Sessions  Vs. Events

 Previously in Universal Analytics, sessions set the foundation of all reporting, and it’s the metric many marketer's cared about most when measuring website traffic. However, in GA4, the basis of reporting changes to events.

 Google's UA Session-Based Data Model

 In UA properties, Analytics groups data into sessions, and these sessions are the foundation of all reporting. A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame.

During a session, Analytics collects and stores user interactions, such as pageviews, events, and eCommerce transactions, as hits. A single session can contain multiple hits, depending on how a user interacts with your website.

 Google's GA4 Events-Based Data Model

In GA4 properties, you can still see session data, but Analytics collects and stores user interactions with your website or app as events. Events provide insight on what’s happening in your website or app, such as pageviews, button clicks, user actions, or system events.

Events can collect and send pieces of information that more fully specify the action the user took or add further context to the event or user. This information could include things like the value of purchase, the title of the page a user visited, or the geographic location of the user.

 In short, the change between the two platforms went from hit-based to action-based.

Ultimately, this data model is more valuable when tracking the user journey. Events such as session starts, clicks, scrolls, downloads etc. are all front and center in GA4.

 MEASURING  BOUNCE RATE  VS. ENGAGEMENT RATE

Another key measurement from Universal Analytics that will become less important during the roll out of GA4 is bounce rate. As a reminder, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that end without any interaction on a page.

While this metric is important, if you’re only measuring bounce rate, you’re ignoring the valuable information of how users are interacting with your website.

Instead, GA4 emphasizes engagement rate, the percentage of sessions lasting longer than 10 seconds, has 2 page views, or has a conversion event.

In short, bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate.

This data is so much more useful for marketers who want to optimize website pages for SEO using data.

 Ga4 Migration Timeline

 While GA4 has been available since October 2020, many marketers have yet to make the switch. It's time to take action.

Add the GA4 property to your website alongside Universal Analytics as soon as possible. This will allow you to collect data in both platforms until July 1, 2023 when UA stops processing data. This is especially valuable for marketers who are familiar with Universal Analytics and will need time to adjust to the new platform. This also gives your company several months of data history in GA4. 

After the July deadline, the next date to remember is January 1, 2024. This is when all Universal Analytics data will be deleted. All data can be exported before this deadline.

The good news is Google makes setting up GA4 simple. There’s no need to add any new code to your website if you’re already using Universal Analytics. Google released this simple GA4 set-up guide to make the transition as smooth as possible. Once GA4 is set up, there is an additional Set Up Assistant in the admin tab that will help you make sure your account is enabling all the new GA4 features.

Meet the leader behind the success of TREW Marketing

Wendy Covey is a CEO, a technical marketing leader, author of Content Marketing, Engineered, one of The Wall Street Journal’s 10 Most Innovative Entrepreneurs in America, and she holds a Texas fishing record. 

With 25 years as a marketing leader in engineering design and manufacturing, Wendy knows the key to building trust and converting technical buyers is understanding their pain and developing compelling, technical content that leads to a solution. Through her company, TREW Marketing, Wendy has helped hundreds of engineering and technical companies become trusted advisors, grow sales pipelines, and increase market share through content marketing.

Wendy’s book, Content Marketing, Engineered (and her podcast of the same name), helps technical marketers looking to adopt or improve their content marketing programs. Wendy often shares her expertise in industry presentations, workshops and on the keynote stage.

Wendy gained national recognition when she was named one of WSJ’s 10 Most Innovative Entrepreneurs in America for bringing a unique, informed perspective to guide business leaders in technical industries. That said, she has something memorable to add to every podcast interview, ranch visit, dinner party, and keynote stage.

“Since 2008, we've partnered with B2B engineering and technology companies to build marketing foundations with differentiated brand messaging, drive engagement with content plans, and generate new opportunities.”