Google Analytics 4 for hotels - what’s around the corner?
Last year Google speedily announced that Universal Analytics, would be being retired. The romantic term ‘sunsetting’ has been used, but it doesn’t really give an accurate picture of the sheer pain this change is causing organizations the world over, and the reasons why they decided to bin their highly popular Universal Analytics (Google Analytics 3), the cornerstone of web-measurement for more than a decade.
In this post we’ll attempt to give a top-line view of why it’s happening, what you need to be aware of, and what’s going to be coming in the tracking roadmap à la Google.
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”
…except when…..
Bert Lance was a close advisor to Jimmy Carter and coined the phrase to describe the meddling governments had in things that didn’t need fixing. It’s the same question many Developers will have been asking themselves when the announcement was made last year by Google that Universal Analytics (UA) would stop receiving data in July 2023. In other words, it would stop working.
Forcing organizations world-wide to migrate to a new analytics platform in just 12-months is quite an unreasonable timeline, and shortly following the announcement Google’s enterprise clients were granted an extension of support for Universal Analytics by another 12-months.
Google is forcing GA4 onto everyone else because their advertising revenues are at stake, and the fate of Facebook showed Google how fragile things were when 3rd party actors, in this case Apple, made changes to the way their operating system tracked its users. When they did this, it basically broke Facebook’s ad-tracking efficiency.
Even if Facebook has been able to offset this change with their Conversion API the additional configuration steps needed are so complicated that it basically destroyed small businesses ability to adapt their systems to make measuring Facebook campaigns easy. So these advertisers left and went elsewhere (such as TikTok!).
In fact Facebook continues to work very very well for hotels, but this has been lost in all the other problems and general mistrust society now has in the platform.
Having seen Facebook get taken down so quickly, and with browser advances and pressure on the way big-tech treats personal information, Google has forced a very quick timeline for safeguarding their revenues against a similar fate.
The thing is, there is no guarantee that the move to the new Google Analytics (GA4) is actually going to save their advertising revenues, they are just hoping they can get everyone on it before there are more changes!
WHAT AN EARTH HAPPENED?
Web browsers are blocking cookies and privacy safeguards are being created around the World (GDPR in EU, PDPA in Thailand, CCPA in California) that directly threaten the information that Google or any other 3rd party code can collect about a visitor that comes to your website.
These measures had to be put in place because the amount of information that was being collected and associated to a person’s profile (digital and offline) was viewed as getting out of control.
There were of course plenty of opportunities for big-tech to stop biting the hand that fed them - they did not have to collect as much information as they did, or they could have simply declared more transparently in the information they collected, and they might argue that they did that, but in the end, people and governments started to question what was being collected, and when they found out what was being collected, they acted.
KILL THE COOKIES AND WE HAVE NO PARTY
Because Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) relies on a 3rd party cookie to capture information from website visitors, 3rd party cookie blocking meant losing the ability to track uses and monetize this data for helping publishers, understand their campaign performance, and the on-selling it to advertisers (who wanted audiences that were visiting specific types of websites).
An example to illustrate:
When a person visits a website, Google Analytics 3 will capture a host of information about the visitor using a cookie. This information passes data that interacts with their advertising products – IE that Google Ads campaign A delivered X Revenue, or even that Visitor A saw Advertisement B.
If a browser blocks third-party cookies there is no way for the website to make this communication – or attribute – it back to Google, Facebook, or the ad-network that relies on this type of mechanism to attribute revenue.
For advertising networks this is called a disaster because if they cannot prove value in terms of delivering proof that they were resonsible for delivering revenue, the publisher asks the question “what’s the point of advertising here!”.
WHAT IS GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4 (GA4)?
Google has a massive task on their hands, not least because while Google Analytics 4 does address some of the privacy concerns that are being legislated by society, it still has an Achilles heel, a reliance on a third-party cookie.
The conversion to GA4 is therefore only part one of a roadmap that is going to see organizations forced into purchasing more Google products to store their data (Google Analytics 4 will only be keeping up to 14 months of data in exploration reports) using Big Query.
Then if browsers do block everything, users will be expected to setup a server instance of Google Analytics 4 that will then mean that GA4 gets delivered as a first-party cookie. All of these measures will have a cost to your organization which leads to questions that many are now asking:
Why are we using Google Analytics if it’s no longer going to be free and will have all these costs associated with it to work?
What alternatives are there to Google Analytics and will they do a better job of telling me what’s happening on my website?
And that is some of what we will be covering in our next post, subscribe using the box below.
If you’ve asked the questions and the answers aren’t coming back with the clarity you might expect, reach out and we would be happy to provide analysis for your hotel.
About the Author
Glyn Spencer Hopkins is the owner of Internet Affected and has been working exclusively with hotels for over a decade.
Internet Affected provides web marketing services tailored to the individual personalities of hotels; a complete range of digital services designed to help them take back ownership of their hotel brand from the OTAs. Specialized marketing solutions to increase guest loyalty, food & beverage bookings, events and wedding inquiries, clearly reported in straightforward language.
