The short answer is no: until these new properties come out of Beta testing, we can’t recommend you use them with your Shopify store. We expect that to be in early 2021.
In July 2019 Google brought out a public beta for combining website and native mobile app tracking called ‘App + Web’ properties. These are technically a big step forward for Google Analytics (GA), combining some of the flexible, event-based tracking from Firebase Analytics for mobile with the deeper reporting and journey analysis tools in GA. This got rebranded as Google Analytics 4 in October 2020.
However, we believe these are not yet suitable for use because the reporting and management APIs which enable Littledata (and many other tools) to access and configure the data in Google Analytics are still in private beta.
Where’s this new reporting going?
What Google appears to be doing is rebuilding Google Analytics from the ground up, so it’s fair to call it ‘GA v2’. Some of the long-term problems they are addressing include:
- Flexible ways of building funnels based on a series of events and page views (i.e. no more limitation on ONLY page views or event funnels)
- More powerful ways to build ‘audiences’ used in other Google tools (such as Google Ads), instead of the clunky and error-prone advanced segment builder
- True event-level views of the data with ‘stream view’
- Enabling events to be sent with many properties, rather than just event ‘action’ and ‘label’
See Krista Seiden’s excellent post for more information on the features.
What’s next with Google Analytics 4?
We expect it to come our of beta and ready for prime time in 2021.
