Goodbye Universal Analytics, Hello GA4

30th August, 2023

In the ever-evolving world of data analytics and tracking, Google Analytics (GA) has played a pivotal role in helping businesses understand their online presence and user behaviour. GA for the visitor attraction sector is a must-have tool – enabling us to monitor changes in website traffic and user behaviour.

Google Analytics 4 brings about several significant changes and improvements.

The key change is that it adopts a different tracking model focusing on events and user interactions rather than page views. It is more suitable for today’s generation. For example, the previous analytics say a user visited one webpage but spent two minutes on it as a negative. The new analytics realise that someone spending two minutes on a website (even if it's one page) is engaged in the content. 

Getting GA4 Set-up with DigiTickets  

At DigiTickets, we’ve partnered with the talented team at Agility Marketing to ensure we’ve optimised our integration to help visitor attractions get the most out of GA4. Agility is a digital marketing agency that specialises in the visitor attraction sector. Working at both a strategic level and delivering numerous digital campaigns, we knew they would be able to help us achieve the optimum solution.

One highlight of the GA4 Tracking solution is we’ve introduced the ability to measure the individual steps throughout the buying journey. You’ll be able to track the individual ticketing pages that a customer visits and where they drop off. We were also keen to roll out our GA4 set-up early so that clients could run the data in tandem with their UA account.

Liz Dimes, Digital Marketing Director at Agility Marketing said:

“We were delighted to support DigiTickets. This summer, we are running over 15 visitor attraction digital ad campaigns and being able to track conversions is vital. DigiTickets have made the set-up easier for us marketeers.

For all other website engagement data, the new GA4 is a little trickier to use than Universal but will be so much better.  For example, you can now identify the scroll rate of any web page; a solution you used to only get with paid for heat mapping tools. At Agility, we’ve pulled data for our clients into an easy-to-use Looker Studio, which creates dashboards to display key data for our clients without being a GA4 reporting expert.”

To start GA4 Ecommerce tracking, simply add your GA4 measurement ID into DigiTickets and your data will immediately start to pull through into your analytics account. If you haven’t added your GA4 properties, then make sure you add them as soon as you can. Otherwise, you won’t be able to track your all-important data. 

Case Study; Mead Open Farm 

Since partnering with DigiTickets and Agility Marketing, Mead Open Farm has successfully enhanced its understanding of ticketing data by leveraging GA4.

Agility Marketing is a key marketing partner for Mead Open Farm, promoting the visitor attraction to visitors during the school holidays and term time.

Having integrated the GA4 platform into its ticketing system, Mead Open Farm can now gain valuable insights and understanding of where people drop off in the buying journey and can evaluate other ticket sales patterns.

Moving into the Autumn, the collaboration between DigiTickets and Agility Marketing will empower the farm to unlock the full potential of their ticketing data, enabling them to make informed business decisions and ultimately improve the visitor experience.