Discover the power of data-driven decision making

Making business decisions purely based on feelings is a thing of the past. It's not without reason that data is called the new gold. Data lets you make decisions based on facts and figures rather than assumptions or a gut feeling. Many entrepreneurs and managers might have a rough idea of their customers' needs and preferences, but times change, and businesses should evolve with it. What will happen if your customers' needs and preferences change?

Does this mean feelings have no place at all in making decisions? No, feelings will always have a place in decision making. However, your feeling should be well informed; guided by facts.

How do I start making data-driven business decisions?

For many entrepreneurs, making data-driven business decisions will start with their website. The best starting point to gain insight into your website visitors is Google Analytis 4 (GA4). However, GA4 can be a bit messy. It might take a bit of effort to find what you're looking for. Luckily, we at Data-driven.com are here to help you out.

What are the benefits of Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) brings with it many innovations. The previous version of Google Analytics, called Universal Analytics (UA), was based on sessions. Sessions are what a visitor does on your website within a specific time period. GA4, however, is based on so-called 'events.' Events are the specific interactions between the visitor and your website. This includes clicking, scrolling, watching videos, etc. The big advantage of event-based GA4 is that you can gain deeper insight into the behavior of your website and app visitors. In addition, there are many other benefits, such as:

Cross-device tracking: GA4 gives you the opportunity to create a more complete picture of your website visitors. For example, a visitor might visit your website on a mobile phone and then continue on a desktop and finally switch to a tablet. Where UA sees this as three different visitors, GA4 sees this as one person. For your marketing and advertising efforts, it is very important that you have insight into the behavior of your visitors from the first click, which is possible with GA4.

Machine learning: Google uses machine learning to map insights and make recommendations. This could include alerting you to major changes in website traffic, making predictions for future performance, making recommendations for targeting potentially interesting audiences, identifying and retargeting abandoned shopping cart users (e-commerce), etc.

Privacy: While privacy in UA was still very dependent on user settings, while GA4 has been developed with your visitors' privacy in mind. For example, user data in GA4 is automatically anonymized and user data in GA4 is automatically deleted after 26 months. In addition, GA4 uses 'Google Signals', which allows the anonymous collection of user data without personally identifying information.

BigQuery: One of the main advantages of GA4 over UA is the ability to export your data to BigQuery. BigQuery is Google's own data warehouse service, which allows you to store and then analyze large amounts of data. While exporting Google Analytics data to BigQuery was previously only possible for companies with a Google Analytics 360 account (costs starting at $150,000 per year), this is now possible for everyone; even if you have a free GA4 account. You then only pay for the storage and querying of your data. (These are the costs of analyzing your data using SQL queries.) The first 10GB of total storage and 1GB of monthly queries are completely free. Streaming your GA4 data to BigQuery is also free for most small and medium websites.