Google has released a new version of Google Analytics and it’s getting some horrible reviews…
Just had to add it to a new third party site (no universal code option available), and having now poked around in it for a few hours, I can safely report that it’s a dog (with apologies to man’s best friend.)
All of the useful data has been stripped out (or you have to do some convoluted filters, comparisons, audiences, intentions, funnels and cohorts stuff, that only college grad marketing analysis majors would be familiar with knowing how to set up.)
To which someone replied…
Well written jpalmer - I would be more kind to dogs though - I’d compare it to what comes out of the dog’s backside.
Very difficult use, counter intuitive, finding how to save reports once you have set them up is not obvious.
It’s like Google have taken away the basics that you relied on for day to day monitoring and just left the bells and whistles that you’d use from time to time.
Read more over at Webmaster World - but TL;DR - so far no one likes it…
https://www.webmasterworld.com/analytics/5015725.htm
If you want to see how bad it is for yourself… Login to Google, then go here…
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342
Then click on “ACCESS DEMO ACCOUNT”…
You’ll see there are two GA4 properties and one Universal property. Go to one of the GA4 properties.
Then try to do something really simple - like a full list of which sites are sending referral traffic, or a full list of social sites are sending social traffic.
It’s all graphs and no data.
I used to think folks who worked at Google were top of their class types. Apparently that’s changed. For the life of me I don’t understand why they thought v4 was ready to be released.