With less than one month to go (at the time of this article's inception) before Google sunsets standard Universal Analytics properties, it's never been more important to migrate to Google Analytics 4 and start building historical data. The Magento 2 platform already offers numerous opportunities to do so, featuring a basic implementation out-of-the-box. This, however, isn't enough of a data collection capability for most stores, which is where Google Analytics 4 extensions come in.
Tracking user behavior across your website is crucial for running an online business, and Google Analytics is the best way to collect data about the customer lifecycle. Google Analytics 4 uses machine learning to build and create reports which help you make data driven decisions so you can shift up your business strategies and find the best ways to interact with the people that visit your site and fulfil the customer journey.
The Google Analytics 4 PRO extension
At WeltPixel, we've always been convinced that proper data collection is of the utmost importance for anyone running an online Magento store, which is why, as soon as Google Analytics 4 was first launched, we jumped on the opportunity and used our experience building and maintaining one of the most popular Google Analytics Universal Analytics extensions for the Magento platform to bring that same power and those same tracking capabilities to Google Analytics 4, with the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with Google Tag Manager Support extension, thereby also creating a seamless process of migration from standard Universal Analytics properties over to the new Google Analytics implementation.
The module features a vast amount of tracking capabilities for all eCommerce events that matter to an online store, such as Item List Views, Item Views, Checkout Step Tracking and Purchases. Moreover, the PRO version features the implementation of Google's Measurement Protocol functionality, which allows it to send data eCommerce events server-side, thus bypassing many of the regular client-side tracking obstacles, allowing it to collect data more accurately, and ensure you have access to the proper insights to analyze and explore the metrics that really matter to your business.
Compatibility with the Hyvä Theme
The Hyvä Theme is a popular frontend theme for Magento, which prides itself with great performance metrics and reducing some of the complexity that Magento is notorious for. Hyvä essentially removes most of the aspects of Magento's customizability that developers don't like and keeps the ones that they do.
That being said, we're happy to announce that we've taken it upon ourselves to ensure users of the Hyvä Theme have access to our extension's raw Google Analytics 4 tracking capabilities and have made the PRO version of our extension officially fully compatible with the Hyvä Theme, joining the best of both worlds and ensuring users across all platforms are able to properly collect data and migrate from their Universal Analytics property over to Google Analytics 4 and benefit from all the new features and new metrics the platform has to offer.
How to gain access to the Hyvä Google Analytics 4 compatibility module
There are a few ways to gain access to the compatibility implementation that we've created, so let's go over them below:
- Install the Google Analytics 4 Hyvä Compatibility module provided when downloading the Google Analytics 4 PRO extension from weltpixel.com. The installation details and instructions can be found in the documentation that comes with your extension, or the Google Analytics 4 extension User Guide
- Install the compatibility module via Hyvä's repositories - To find out more about how this can be done, check out the official Hyvä Documentation on the subject of compatibility modules
The first method involves the traditional Magento installation method in the app/code directory, while the second method allows you to use composer to perform the installation. Choose the method you think works best for you based on your Magento setup and start making use of the vastly superior Google Analytics 4 platform to map out the customer journey on your website, build Google Ads, track active users, reach new audiences, build an analysis hub and much, much more!
While Google Analytics 4 has a steeper learning curve than Universal Analytics, its machine learning tracking capabilities and better data structure offer you much more control and new insights, so getting started now is a no-brainer!
