The old Google Analytics is being retired. What can you expect from GA4?

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The market is shaking once again as Google has announced its new and final update!

News is rife that is shaking up the data market, with the announcement that Google Universal Analytics, or GA3 as many know it, will cease to function in 2023, to be replaced by GA4.

I feel like I'm representing many of my colleagues when I types of nurse databases say that mixing words like change, update or new parameter with the name Google is scary and makes my hair stand on end!

This is because, even though Google is always announcing a change in its way of understanding and using information, it takes us out of our comfort zone and constantly forces us to learn new methods that involve modifying our communication strategies.

And in this same dynamic, the tax migration to GA4 impacts us because it means that we must adapt to Google again and this is why digital professionals have made themselves felt on the web in this regard.

Are you also worried or scared about what is to come? Let's find out a little more about what this new major Google change is all about.

Are we saying goodbye to Universal Analytics?
It's not that radical yet and it's not the first time that changes have occurred in Google Analytics .

It is not for nothing that the name of the new version is GA4 and the one we use, for most of us, is GA3. This means that there was already a version 2 and 1 of Google Analytics and that major changes in the tool are not a novelty.

Not to mention that technology advances faster every year, and intelligence, both human and artificial, follows these levels of development and new paradigms.

Despite the previous versions 2 and 1, I am too young in the job market to be able to tell you about the impacts brought about in 2012 by the implementation of the current version GA3 or Universal Analytics (UA), replacing GA2 or Classic Analytics (CA); which still works, despite the years, among very few companies.

Let us now take a look at the changes affecting the market today.

But before, I want to share with you that, on behalf of Rock Content , what we feel most in this situation is the great privilege of being able to live in a time of inflection for Google, in which now all professionals in the digital market must implement a new organizational structure, analysis and compilation of information, to receive the GA4 version with open arms and get the most out of the data.

Have you imagined the number of robust communication strategies that will come out of the new major GA implementation? Because we can!

What changes does GA4 bring to the market?
Without going into the depths of the subject, because we will prepare a complete content for that, I can tell you that GA4 was created in order to rethink the formulas in which data is available without the use of cookies.

This idea arose from the damage to Google's reputation due to the controversial relationship between the tracking of user information and the privacy problems generated, mainly, by Third-Party-Cookies .

In addition to the problems and with more positive arguments in mind, GA4 was created to bring new proposals to the current information age, in which platforms seek to integrate more quickly and where both Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning took on such relevance that they stopped being just technologies and transcended to a strategic level of communication, impossible to avoid.

And this is what GA4 is promising to deliver.

How will GA4 affect digital marketing strategies?
Nowadays, marketing professionals work based on performance metrics that tell us whether or not we are achieving our objectives in terms of communication and generating sales opportunities.

From this, think of GA4 as a tool capable of alerting us, through notifications, about important changes in the trends of our KPIs .

The latter, for its part, takes us away from traditional planning of objectives based on the simple calculation of visits to a website, for example, and brings us closer to a complete measurement of the information with which we can deliver specific communications for each market of our interest.

This last bit, for us at Rock Content , who work with international markets, is simply pure gold.

How do we at Rock Content view the changes in GA4?
Better late than never.

I confess that as the current leader of the three main Rock Content blogs for the United States, Brazil and Mexico, it is only today that I really came to worry about updating the system.

Well, let's say that the day-to-day absorbed us as a team, to respond first to the emergencies of recent times. Despite this, I like the idea that now GA4 becomes a new priority for the Rock team and we can get to work on getting to know the tool and reconstructing the information, before the change becomes an inevitable reality.

If I learned anything from working with Google and its various tools, it is that nothing lasts forever. And that, as digital communication professionals, flexibility should be the first quality that accompanies us.

There is no point in creating attachments to the old. It is better to learn from the past in order to be able to take on what comes next. And as I have already mentioned, repeatedly, what is coming with GA4 is a new analysis tool capable of taking our knowledge of the market to another level.

As digital professionals, we are the holders of the great fourth world power: communication ; and being aware that the changes that will be implemented serve to optimize our resources and protect us more as natural persons, GA4 is simply a tool that will help us become ethical with our strategies and that is priceless.

So the initial invitation here is to learn how to learn. We are one year away from seeing GA4 become the core property of Google Analytics, so we must hurry to make the migration, not out of fear of losing data, but because it is necessary for our business health and because technology simply moves forward with or without us.

So it's better to be with us

What have we learned at Rock Content with Google Analytics?
There isn't a day that goes by that we at Rock Content don't go into Google Analytics.

And truth be told, anyone who works with digital channels should, at the very least, use the tool first and last thing they do on a work day.

At Rock Content we have several extremely important and interesting data analysis tools, but the amount of real-time information that GA provides us cannot be compared to the rest of the tools.

We have built our success in Digital Marketing based on GA graphs. Our strategies have been consolidated at the same time that we have learned to interpret the data . And finally, the numbers that GA keeps on our domains tell the stories that we have lived at Rock Content during our 9 years of history in the market.

When I say stories, it is not a romanticized metaphor for Google Analytics, but rather a reality that, with the metrics it has provided us during this time, we have been able to reconstruct how the decisions we made or failed to make as a company were, even if we current collaborators were not the ones who defined the paths in the past.

Analytics has already shown us how we survived domain, hosting and layout migrations in previous years.


It also tells us how a strategy changed in terms of increasing or decreasing content production, and even when our work teams suffered alterations or rotations.


GA has taught us about the behavior of not only independent users, but also countries and nations with their customs and thirst for information. It has reminded us, day after day, how the entire world interprets a topic in a different way and, even more beautifully, how it makes use of information to solve its personal problems.

Analytics is a tool that helps us not only look back to reconstruct and understand the past, but also to build the future from it and train ourselves in predicting behaviors, which ultimately translate into strategies.

Being such a complete tool already, we are simply placing all our expectations on GA4 to take our next big step.

What do we expect at Rock Content with the change to GA4?
In conclusion, Google Analytics, in all its versions, has been part of the construction of the history of Rock Content . Therefore, if Google today insists on the implementation of its latest version GA4, it is because great events are about to come to the digital and data market.

As much as change terrifies us, at Rock Content we can't wait to continue participating in this new information paradigm.

With the promise of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence that GA4 brings, the longer we take to implement the version, the longer it will take for ownership to learn and show us insights about the market, about human behaviors, and about our businesses. So, by tomorrow, it's too late.

And here between us; today we are talking about GA4 as the final version, but I am sure that we will soon be meeting again through this medium to talk about the arrival of a GA5, why not?

We therefore hope to overcome this first phase of migration in order to bring new reflections on Google Analytics and so that in the future we can fondly remember the migration feat that digital professionals had to experience en masse in 2022.