2020 was a big year for Google. Halfway they published a major upgrade for PageSpeed Insights and near the end of the year the Search Giant released v4 of its Analytics API, introducing a bunch of new features.
Lots of CAOS users were eagerly waiting for me to publish an update. Granted, it took a while, but it’s here now! And I appreciate your patience. Let’s take a look at what we got here, and more importantly, how to set it up!
Interlude
I can’t begin my first post of the new year, without wishing you all the best, perfect health and happiness to you and yours. Although it was a big year for me, 2020 was a terrible year for lots of us. I hope 2021 will turn this around. For all of us.
Do a search for Google Analytics 4 features and you’ll be flooded with SEO/SEA marketeers explaining the key features of Analytics’ API update:
- Smarter, AI-powered insights and predictions,
- Deeper integration with Google Ads,
- And so on.
I was more interested in the technical/performance aspect of this update: what do all these new features mean for your site’s performance? I.e. how does it perform compared to its older siblings, analytics.js
and gtag.js
?
Technical Breakdown of Google Analytics 4 library
First off, Google Analytics’ V4 API is incompatible with analytics.js
and can only be used with Global Site Tag (gtag.js
) or Google Tag Manager (gtm.js
).
This means that the relatively small Universal Analytics library (analytics.js
: ~46KB) is replaced in favor of gtag.js
, which weighs in at about 130 KB.
What I do like about the new Web + App property (gtag.js
) is that it’s no longer a wrapper for analytics.js
i.e. it no longer needs to load analytics.js
in order to properly track visitors. This makes it feel a little less bloaty.
It’s still almost triple the size of analytics.js
, though…
Will CAOS’ Stealth Mode support gtag.js
?
Because it’s no longer a wrapper for analytics.js
, I can (carefully) say: Yes!
No promises, though, because I haven’t finished my research yet, but till now, I haven’t met any issues while running my tests.
The ‘old’ gtag.js
is marked deprecated since CAOS v3.8.0 and will be removed in a future release. I.e. Google Analytics V3 users should either stick with analytics.js
, or consider upgrading to V4 and use the new gtag.js
.
Setup Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in CAOS
Since v.3.8.0 CAOS offers out-of-the-box support for Google Analytics 4. Setting it up is easy and involves a few steps (mostly in your Google Analytics dashboard).
Refer to the Google Analytics 4 section of CAOS’ Documentation for a full step-by-step instruction on how to setup GA4 in CAOS.
Summary
Today we’ve taken a short look at Google Analytics’ new and improved V4 API. We concluded that although the gtag.js
library is bigger in size, compared to analytics.js
, it does offer some improvements over the old library.