Why Google Analytics 4 Sucks for B2B Content Marketers

Meta Description: Google Analytics 4 is a great tool for data analysts, but not for B2B content marketers. Here's what you need to know.

Google Analytics 4 is a great tool for data analysts, but not for B2B content marketers.. and why you should use a great alternative that we’ll show you later in this blog..

If you're a content marketer, you might be surprised to learn that Google Analytics is not always the best tool for measuring your success. While it can be helpful in a lot of ways, it can also be downright overwhelming and time consuming for content marketers and SaaS business owners who are not data analysts.

In this blog post, we'll take a look at some of the reasons why Google Analytics is not always the best tool for content marketing, and what you can do to make sure you're using the right and easier alternative for your SaaS B2B content marketing needs. 

The Problem

For a B2B content marketer, it can take 6 to 8 website visits over a span of 3 to 6 months for a visitor to turn into a lead, and hopefully a customer. For Content Marketing, attribution is so much more than ad reports, clicks, and landing page conversions, it is also about measuring education, lead and customer stages, and ultimately their monetary value. And correlating it all to your content and CM efforts. Why? To show your Content Marketing value!

I have 5-hundred content pages in 5-content clusters. I want to generate some insight or a report. What content is contributing to generating the highest value leads?  What content clusters are leads with a lead score of over 50 consuming most? (e.g. most interested in!) Content Attribution…where to focus our budget and efforts? What about correlating content to revenue or lifetime customer value? How do you do this with Google Analytics?

I’ll tell you how…! Start with getting a GA expert to set up content groups (link). Then get a programmer to add custom tags to everyone of those 500 content pages on your website(s). Then wait those 3 to 6 months to collect the data…as GA cannot correlate with past visits. Only then can you ask a data nerd to export it and, somehow:

• Correlate it to leads, and lead scoring
• Correlate it to customers
• Correlate it to content groups
• Correlate it to campaign
• Correlate it to geographic regions
• etc…

And feed it into another package to generate any actual information. So 6 months to a year, and a lot of cost and effort, to start to answer these basic questions.

God forbid that you then have another question based upon this information…assuming the timeliness of it makes it relevant. Another round of data collection, programmers, data nerds to answer your question.

No wonder most never even try. This is why GA4 sucks for content marketers. 

What if there is a super easy way? A simple way to go from needing a team of programmers, data analysts, and 6-months lead time… and jump straight to this… 

Let's Get to Know GA4

GA4 is the latest version of Google Analytics. Launched in October 2020, it's relatively new compared to UA, which has been around for more than a decade.

B2B marketers will need a lot of getting used to before being able to actually use GA4. That means more time and effort on your part. More hard work.

You'll also encounter new terminology and you’d also notice the UI of GA4 looks completely different from UA. 

What is GA4 for?

GA4 does its best to make everything seamless across properties. Compared to UA which is website-focused, GA4 is great for eCommerce and marketing sites, and both native and web apps. 

You can have a very comprehensive view of your visitors' interaction not just on your website but with your entire offer as well although before you get to enjoy and appreciate all these, you need to study and master all the intricacies of GA4. 

By the way, do you know one of the reasons why content marketers need to measure content clusters in Google Analytics 4 to find your most relevant content or content clusters? 

Read the full article here, “Content Clusters: How to Measure in Google Analytics 4”:“Content Clusters: How to Measure in Google Analytics4”

Is GA4 good for B2B marketing?

If you’re a tech savvy type of person or a data analyst, yes, GA4 is good for you. Again, you need tons of reading and studying before you can master GA4. 

Some companies would rather outsource the use of GA4 to data experts. Plus, it will take some time getting used to. 

They’re not the easiest to set up in WordPress, and that’s led many marketers to stick with the “basics” of GA: users, sessions, bounce rate, etc. 

You’ll still get those in GA4, but you’ll also be able to set up custom analytics packages much more easily. 

That means faster insights tuned to your business, rather than “let’s try to cut our bounce rate by 10%.”

However, for B2B content marketers, it is not. It kinda sucks! 

You know why? Because you’d have to go through all the technical steps to migrate from UA to GA4 plus you have tons of studying to do in order to be able to read all those metrics and stats, not to mention, understand, analyze and interpret them. 

Sounds like a lot of headache? Yes, I know how it feels ‘cause I’ve been there. In the end, you’d only be staring at numbers for hours at a time and still not get any meaningful insights on whether your content succeeded or not. 

The answer? SaturnOne. An easier to setup and use analytics tool designed for B2B content marketers. You'll get faster actionable insights in just a few clicks and optimize your content for a higher rate of conversions. 

As a B2B content marketer, it will also help you to identify the areas of your blog that are optimizing best. This can be very helpful when it comes to making changes and picking the best topics for your blog posts. 

By tracking which posts are working best, you’ll be able to identify the topics that are most successful for your audience. Read the full article, “7 Great Reasons Why Content Marketers Should Use Web Funnel Analytics”

 Another Reason Why GA 4 Sucks: Google Analytics is not a Content Marketing Solution

One of the main reasons why Google Analytics is not the best tool for measuring your content marketing success is because it's not designed to help you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. 

In fact, Google Analytics is actually a pretty great tool for tracking website traffic and user behavior. But, it's not really meant to be used for measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.

That's because Google Analytics is not a content marketing solution. It's a website analytics tool, unlike SaturnOne, seamless, easy setup and everything under one dashboard so you can focus on marketing and sales and not on statistics and figures. 

The Better Alternative: SaturnOne Analytics

SaturnOne Analytics can significantly make your life and business smarter, easier and faster. 

Tracking and measuring the success rate of your Content Marketing is made easier with SaturnOne.

Google Analytics can be daunting - it takes more than 50 steps, with a programmer and data analyst. BUT with SaturnOne, only 1 to 3 steps!

Just log in to your account and BOOM! You can see almost everything on Page 1.  DOWNLOAD the FREE eBook here: https://www.saturnone.io/2x-mrr-growth-ebook

Takeaways

Google Analytics 4 can be awesome if you are able to master and apply all the intricacies of the tool. Most entrepreneurs and marketers would rather hire an expert than waste time, money and effort on getting used to it. 

Others would prefer a smarter and cost effective alternative — an easy to use app designed for content marketers! SaturnOne is the key for you to focus on productivity and more revenues!

Also, as a B2B content marketer, you should be aware of the behavior of your visitors. You should know what they are looking for and what kind of information they are looking for. 

If you have the knowledge about your audience, then you can design a better content strategy for your business. You can also understand the user behavior and design a better marketing campaign for your business.

We hope you liked this article about “Why Google Analytics 4 Sucks for B2B Content Marketers”.

Reference:

1.Google Analytics 4 for B2B Marketers: UA Goes Away in July 2023!: https://altitudemarketing.com/blog/google-analytics-4-b2b-marketers/#:~:text=UA%20is%20website%2Dfocused.,brand%2C%20not%20just%20your%20site. 

2.SaturnOne: https://www.saturnone.io/

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