Column: Getting to grips with GA4 is challenging and rewarding

Whether you love or hate Google’s Universal Analytics or define your relationship with the aging platform as complicated, those with the enterprise version will be waving goodbye on July 1 2024, when Google pulls the plug in favour of its successor, Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

For my part, migrating Flight Centre’s entire analytics system to the new platform proved eye-opening one day, frustrating the next, but ultimately rewarding, as we’ve had the luxury of getting a crack at it well ahead of Google’s July deadline.

As with many other businesses, Google Analytics is the lifeblood not only of Flight Centre’s digital marketing efforts but the online footprint of our entire brand. Google Analytics helps us evaluate how our customers engage with our digital storefront, what travel products excite them, what promotional content they’re consuming, and what they’re asking us.

Stakeholders from various units within the business trust our owned data to inform decisions about how to develop the business based on how we're performing online. When it came time to roll up our sleeves with the analytics overhaul, there was definitely a pervading feeling of “no pressure now”.

Australia is the biggest regional arm of Flight Centre’s global operation, we jumped in the deep end and started here, figuring if we were to strike teething problems this would be where we’d most likely find them.

That would then enable us to devise solutions and roll out GA4 glitch-free to our four other regions without duplicating the fuss. Working with our Google Marketing Platform partner agency, XPON Technologies Group, in the last quarter of 2021 we started an audit process to document all our existing Universal Analytics (GA3) tags within our suite of Google Tag Manager (GTM) containers.

The audit allowed us to accurately determine what tags were still in use and required for migration. We followed a standardised documentation process in collaboration with our team at XPON to accurately record our current state and then map these to the new GA4 corresponding events.

This approach allowed us to streamline the implementation as well as ensure the new analytics package accurately captured comparable data, but also enhanced measurement of our online customers.

We started with rolling out a test for GA4 property, when we were satisfied with the data the test produced, we then moved forward with a production instance of GA4. We're currently running both our existing GA3 analytics package in parallel with our new GA4 analytics package until the hard cut-off on July 1.

After we got our Australian instances up and running at the end of March 2022, we then applied the streamlined migration process to each of our four remaining global regions in NZ, Canada, South Africa and the UK, ensuring that we had all markets up and running with concurrent instances of GA3 and GA4 by the end of August 2022.

This timeline meant we had at least a full 12 months of historical data in GA4 by the time the initial cut-off date of October 2023 for enterprise clients arrived. When Google moved that deadline out to July 2024 it put us well ahead of the game but also brought a few challenges.

At the time of writing, the GA4 platform is still evolving almost weekly. The interface has changed many times since the start of the project and we're constantly having to stay abreast of updates from Google.

Initial dimensions or metrics not available in GA4 that were in GA3 have reappeared late in the project which means we've had to be particularly vigilant with our implementations, adapting them where needed.

Arbitrary limitations on the number and type of custom dimensions available continue to prove challenging in a business where we already ingest a lot of different data points. Limitations imposed by Google on the length or size of values sent through GA4 remain baffling and challenging.

There seems no rhyme nor reason to many of them. Despite the setbacks, we're winning with our migration to GA4, and we're even beginning to enjoy its benefits.

This includes shifting data gathering away from anonymous third-party cookies and towards a greater emphasis on first-party cookies, which provides us with a better-aggregated measurement across devices by delivering a data collection model that is compatible with both app and web environments.

Matt Cowell is the global discipline leader - digital analytics for Flight Centre.