Overcoming the Limitations of GA4 - Whitepaper Copy

Metadata

• Author: rudderstack.com
• Full Title:: Overcoming the Limitations of GA4 - Whitepaper Copy
• Category:: 🗞️Articles
• Document Tags:: CDPs,
• URL:: https://www.rudderstack.com/assets/overcoming-limitations-of-ga4.pdf?utm_source=customer_io&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CMPGN_168_RGArt&utm_content=None&utm_term=%7Bkeyword%7D&utm_referrer=rudderstack&raid=3b74ab678364fdc67a1a2f13a8c541e7&cio_id=a2ab060aaaca018bf213
• Finished date:: 2023-12-28

Highlights

With RudderStack’s integration, you don’t have to create two separate connections and then de-duplicate events via filtering and transformations. You can simply set up one connection and flip on hybrid mode (View Highlight)

Not sure if I understand why GA4 does Not have full data capture

Capturing all of your data requires using an analytics-agnostic tool specifically designed to collect raw, first-party data. RudderStack’s SDKs are purpose-built for capturing customer events and can be proxied behind your site or app URL, giving you full data capture. (View Highlight)

But what alternate do they give to explore data to people without data skills

By gathering all of your company’s data into a single location, including traffic data from your websites and apps, you’re able to build efficient analytics on large, diverse, high-quality datasets to answer questions that analytics tools like GA4 are not able to answer on their own. (View Highlight)

Is this outdated?

Google Analytics is a notorious silo for this kind of behavioral data and, even though you can technically export the data through ETL jobs or, with GA4 to Google products, it still requires a ton of modeling to be usable…and that’s before you even try to figure out how to join user identities with other kinds of customer data from other sources. (View Highlight)

It’s worth noting that RudderStack’s event schemas are specifically designed to make this kind of modeling much easier. In order to perform the above analysis, you’d count pageviews by distinct anonymousId (which represents a single user, anonymous or known) to get a unique pageview number, then use the referrer value to group pageviews by the site that referred them. To maintain continuity with Google Analytics’ default channel grouping, you would assign a channel name to a group of URLs (i.e., Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook could be grouped into a channel called ‘Social’). (View Highlight)

RudderStack offers multiple dbt models that, when run on event data from RudderStack, can scaffold nearly complete data models for key web analytics use cases: ● Sessionization ● Customer journey mapping ● Identity resolution ● Web analytics (View Highlight)