Aug 2, 20224 min read

What New York Law Firms Need To Know About Google Analytics 4

Updated: Nov 3, 2022

Why You Need To Pay Attention To Google Analytics 4 On Your Law Firm Website

If you're running SEO for lawyers in NYC, you need to pay attention to many technical factors to keep climbing or stay on top of the SERPs. You're advised to pay attention to Local SEO in NYC, law firm website designs, and other advanced settings.

More importantly, you should pay attention to changes in Google, its algorithm, and its relevant tools. Google Analytics 4 is one of those tools that has recently had crucial changes.

That said, let's look at how these changes can affect New York Law Firms.

What Is Google Analytics 4 For Law Firms?

The most recent version of Google Analytics for tracking websites and mobile apps is Google Analytics 4—Google's newest default tracking configuration. It is an analytics platform that provides insights into user behavior across all of your websites and applications.

All standard Universal Analytics properties won't process new hits on July 1st, 2023. Meanwhile, 360 Universal Analytics properties won't process new hits on October 1st, 2023. Though websites with existing web properties can continue to use their current tracking for the time being.

Then, you have at least six months to view the already processed data in Universal Analytics.

Google Analytics 4 is an entirely new method of tracking users and leads across websites and applications that will soon become the standard and only choice, not an improvement to Google's Universal Analytics.

Why Is Google Doing This Change?

Since Google began switching from session-based tracking to something more focused on users and events. This change has been in the works for years. They launched Google Signals in 2018 to beta test user monitoring across devices based on Google and Chrome login information.

Google aims to use its wealth of data from Chrome browsers, in-app and on-site tracking, and first-party user data due to new privacy regulations due to the gradual loss of third-party cookies.

With the release of Google Analytics 4, Google requires companies to rethink how they view their users and adjust their measuring tools so that they are only centered on the users.

This makes getting reports and analysis reflect a law firm leads' flexible behavior as they access a brand's website or app on various devices and browsers at different stages of their journey. As a result, tracking multiple web or app sessions is no longer sufficient to gain insight into user behavior.

Google Analytics 4 Vs. Google Universal Analytics

Google Analytics 4 fundamentally alters Google's tracking strategy.

Google Analytics 4 is event-based, with the guiding idea that all interactions may be recorded as an event across all web and app visits. In contrast to Universal Analytics, which focuses on tracking several hit kinds, including page hits, event hits, eCommerce hits, and social shares.

This allows for simple yet very configurable data, saves Google processing space, and enables Google Analytics to generate various reports that are more user-centric.

What Are The Key Changes Of Google Analytics 4 That Affect Lawyer SEO?

Many of these changes can alter current and dictate future strategies for your law firm:

Automated Insights and Recommendations Using Machine Learning

In addition to combining data from websites and mobile apps, Google Analytics 4 makes significant advancements in machine learning to give insights, prediction trends, and suggestions for audience targeting that is most profitable.

Google Analytics 4 may now alert you to data abnormalities, such as significant surges from a particular channel that might point to a piece of content going viral. Alternatively, a sudden decline in traffic can be a sign that there are problems with your tracking code that need to be fixed right away.

Using predictive measures, Google Analytics can give you insight into what has occurred and what may occur in the future. The most promising of these KPIs is the estimated revenue you can gain from a particular user session you can then target with Google Ads. This will help you determine the value of each audience segment to your bottom line.

Attribution Of YouTube Shares And Activities

Although you undoubtedly already know that Google is the largest search engine in the world, you might be shocked to learn that Google also owns YouTube, the second-largest search engine. YouTube is essential for building brand exposure and interacting with customers online because it serves more than a billion hours of video daily. Still, it has been difficult to accurately attribute revenue to the platform.

Google Analytics and YouTube are now more tightly integrated into Google Analytics 4 to demonstrate the actual value of YouTube. For example, back then, you could only credit YouTube for conversions if someone actually visited your website after watching the video. Unfortunately, most people don't behave that way on the video platform.

Instead, viewers frequently view your video and move on to another video without likely visiting your website, which results in a missed attribution point from YouTube.

To address this, Google Analytics now provides view-through conversions from YouTube so that marketers can comprehend how views of a video affect your revenue rather than just website clicks. This significant adjustment will demonstrate YouTube's genuine usefulness to your marketing initiatives.