How Google's media team handled its upgrade to GA4
Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2025 9:52 am
With less than a month to go until the deadline to migrate to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), marketers need to prepare for the change or risk seeing their measurement activities disrupted.
As some need guidance, we thought it might be helpful to share the experience of Media Lab, jamaica phone number material Google’s media team, who planned and executed this transition over the past two years. Like many marketers, they needed to retain all the measurement capabilities they relied on while benefiting from GA4’s new privacy-protecting features.
Their case was particularly complex because they drive traffic to hundreds of Google-operated websites and apps around the world. Each of those properties had a different Universal Analytics setup, which led to a number of inconsistencies. For example, events were defined in different ways, making it difficult to aggregate reports at a global level. So they decided that moving to Google Analytics 4 was an opportunity to create a consistent analytics framework to measure performance across all products and teams.
While the primary goal was to create consistency, they also had other purposes in mind for their upgrade to GA4:
Responsiveness . Supporting the work of many teams means that measurement must respond to the unique needs of each team. For example, the reporting and information needed by website and app design teams is completely different from what the campaign optimization team needs.
Privacy . Operating globally means complying with different privacy regulations, so they needed a tool that prioritized this aspect and adapted to regional compliance requirements.
Actionability at scale . Because they collect and report on data from thousands of websites and apps, they wanted Google Analytics 4 to make their marketing decisions easier by finding ways to act on this high volume and velocity of user data, input, and feedback.
To achieve these goals, the team needed to move away from regional and product area fragmentation. This phenomenon inevitably arises when marketers focused on different geographies and products report and analyze data in different ways.
They partnered with the marketing technology team to create a central analytics team to oversee and manage the upgrade to GA4 across the organization. This team is not only responsible for implementing Google Analytics, but also for managing its use post-upgrade.
Centralized control allows them to standardize their measurements across all marketing websites and applications, while ensuring product marketing teams are involved in technical discussions.
They took a methodical approach to implementation, starting with websites and apps that were high priority for the business based on ad spend. They then looked at their existing analytics processes and created a comprehensive framework for GA4. This framework included, for example, a consistent method for collecting basic data such as page views and external links for all of their websites.
They developed this method using a template in Google Tag Manager, which they were then able to implement across all of their marketing websites. Finally, they implemented the new version of Google Analytics and migrated the sites within a couple of hours.
As some need guidance, we thought it might be helpful to share the experience of Media Lab, jamaica phone number material Google’s media team, who planned and executed this transition over the past two years. Like many marketers, they needed to retain all the measurement capabilities they relied on while benefiting from GA4’s new privacy-protecting features.
Their case was particularly complex because they drive traffic to hundreds of Google-operated websites and apps around the world. Each of those properties had a different Universal Analytics setup, which led to a number of inconsistencies. For example, events were defined in different ways, making it difficult to aggregate reports at a global level. So they decided that moving to Google Analytics 4 was an opportunity to create a consistent analytics framework to measure performance across all products and teams.
While the primary goal was to create consistency, they also had other purposes in mind for their upgrade to GA4:
Responsiveness . Supporting the work of many teams means that measurement must respond to the unique needs of each team. For example, the reporting and information needed by website and app design teams is completely different from what the campaign optimization team needs.
Privacy . Operating globally means complying with different privacy regulations, so they needed a tool that prioritized this aspect and adapted to regional compliance requirements.
Actionability at scale . Because they collect and report on data from thousands of websites and apps, they wanted Google Analytics 4 to make their marketing decisions easier by finding ways to act on this high volume and velocity of user data, input, and feedback.
To achieve these goals, the team needed to move away from regional and product area fragmentation. This phenomenon inevitably arises when marketers focused on different geographies and products report and analyze data in different ways.
They partnered with the marketing technology team to create a central analytics team to oversee and manage the upgrade to GA4 across the organization. This team is not only responsible for implementing Google Analytics, but also for managing its use post-upgrade.
Centralized control allows them to standardize their measurements across all marketing websites and applications, while ensuring product marketing teams are involved in technical discussions.
They took a methodical approach to implementation, starting with websites and apps that were high priority for the business based on ad spend. They then looked at their existing analytics processes and created a comprehensive framework for GA4. This framework included, for example, a consistent method for collecting basic data such as page views and external links for all of their websites.
They developed this method using a template in Google Tag Manager, which they were then able to implement across all of their marketing websites. Finally, they implemented the new version of Google Analytics and migrated the sites within a couple of hours.