GA4 is a free web analytics tool provided by Google. Many companies managing websites have already implemented GA4 in response to the announcement of tracking cessation from July 2023. Surprisingly, many people have implemented GA4, but are content just reporting the data, without leveraging it for website improvement. Simply implementing it is not enough; it’s meaningless if you can’t utilize GA4. Utilizing GA4 involves conducting proper analysis, turning those results into actions, and enhancing your return on marketing investment. It’s incredibly important to understand the genuine usage of GA4 from the analysis results, like actual onsite initiatives, marketing strategies, advertising strategies, and so on.

First, you need to reaffirm your site’s purpose, define what constitutes a goal, and set targets. Whether these align with your business strategy is also crucial. Merely “having a site” doesn’t make sense. By conducting web analytics–assuming GA4 is properly implemented, data collection is working, and you’re checking more than just rough figures–you can grasp a series of user actions. You can understand who has accessed your site, who has reached your target page, who has made inquiries, and who has made purchases. Instead of consistently delivering ads to the same target, you can encourage inquiries, requests for materials, product purchases, and more by retargeting ads to the segmented “who” data. It’s vital to keep rotating the PDCA cycle to contribute to better results: grasp the current situation, identify bottlenecks and other issues, make hypotheses on whether to reinforce advertising or revise content based on these findings, and then implement strategies.

Analysis with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) involves using metrics, dimensions, segments, and other elements suitable for your purposes to compare data from websites or apps measured with GA4, pondering over the results, and forming hypotheses.

Here are some concrete examples:

Let’s say there are two patterns for reporting to a supervisor or client.

In the first scenario, the person in charge simply reports the numbers as seen in the report. The recipient of the report is often left with many unanswered questions, such as “So, what’s the conclusion?”, “Did it work?”, “What should we do next?”, and “How much budget should we allocate for the next phase?”.

On the other hand, the person in charge in the second scenario conducts an analysis, comparing the numbers from the report with previous results, segmenting the data, forming hypotheses based on observations, and then proposing future actions. This approach allows the recipient of the report to understand the results, contributions, and challenges, providing a wealth of information for decision-making and making budget planning easier.

The series of steps from analysis to strategy proposal can be visualized as follows:

1. Clarify purpose and goals.
2. Understand the current situation and check the progress towards the goals
3. Identify issues, observe and compare segmented data
4. Formulate hypotheses to identify causes
5. Propose specific measures in response to these hypotheses