This sponsored article was provided by Reason One. 
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) provides a much richer picture of website performance, by leveraging powerful AI, data, and more flexible reporting than what is available in Universal Analytics. The new features and functionality of GA4 allow marketers to tell a holistic data story that lends serious insight to the overall digital roadmap.
- Focus on the user journey today
This is by and large the biggest change—and benefit—to GA4. Rather than focusing on discrete points in time like clicks and conversions, GA4 provides an event-driven holistic view of how users move through your website. Understanding the entire user journey can help you understand how your content is performing and leading to conversions. These journey maps can be translated directly into your larger digital roadmap, helping you identify conversion pages that need to be overhauled or opportunities to reduce friction in the patient-consumer journey.
- Predict user behavior in the future
Pairing the user journey data with custom reporting and audience analysis, you’re able to better envision the road ahead. GA4 audiences provide more targeted segments, based on events and time, giving you a window into what behaviors are more likely to convert. Based on this data, you can build personalization and optimization into your digital roadmap to shorten conversion time and lower churn. Likewise, you can drill down into the user behaviors and content they interact with to further refine your personas.
- Bring your roadmap to life
Nothing helps tell a data story better than visualization, and GA4’s new custom reports give marketers a plethora of options to parse data into meaningful, resonant visuals. Why is this important for your roadmap? One, making your analytics visible beyond just pie charts and line graphs allows you to find, dig into, and get creative about what you’re curious about. Second, leverage. To make the case for projects you’d like to see on your roadmap, it’s helpful to literally paint the picture for leadership to quickly grasp as well.
Switching to GA4 comes with a distinct set of challenges, yet it’s an exciting opportunity for marketers. While we’re working on the here-and-now, GA4 helps us also keep an eye on what could be, which is what a digital roadmap is all about.