Google Analytics, whether Universal Analytics 360 or GA4, is first and foremost a tool for determining which marketing channels drive users and which do not. That is extremely beneficial.

But Google doesn't inform us why something is happening on a page. When circumstances are tough, brands must expand while keeping a close eye on the bottom line. You can't do that unless you know why consumers visited your website, placed one or two things to their cart, and then left without purchasing. 

Consider the following example.

An insurance provider knew that one in every three sessions encountered an error from a specific marketing campaign, but all they could see was a generic message "plan-creation-fails."

With Quantum Metric, they were able to immediately isolate that segment and find that an API 500 problem happens at the moment of policy payment. They supplied a session replay of the problem with data embedded to their developers and QA team to figure out the "why": their backend setup was incorrect for certain schemes, and the email address information was not being passed through correctly. 

Their conversion rate climbed by 5% in the first month after they fixed the problem.

In a market where every dollar counts, we should prioritize getting users to the site and ensuring they have a positive experience while there. To accomplish this, every team must be enabled to promptly discover, share, and resolve issues with the digital experience.

That is why your organization requires a digital experience analytics platform so that everyone in your organization, from CX to product, can better understand the customer's experience utilizing a single source of truth.

Whether you've already switched to GA4 or are using this transition to find methods to supplement it, here are three must-haves for your digital experience analytics platform.

1. Make it simple.

Businesses are intricate. Platforms like Google Analytics have been designed to reflect that complexity--with each new technology we've introduced to our digital domains, we've increased the complexity of analytics. It's time to make things simpler.

You can make it simple for those teams to agree on session replay. Session replay will not help you much on its own. But is it fundamentally tied to a strong analytics platform? We're talking now.

That is also why we produced Atlas: industry-specific guides aimed at boosting unique user experiences with your digital properties. Anyone, from a marketer to an engineer to a customer service representative, should have access to the data and insights they require to grow your organization.

2. Recognize and quantify the impact.

A journey is the path you design for clients to walk through your website or app in experience analytics.

However, even if you prepare for it one way, most users will follow their own path once there. Some tools, such as Google Analytics, will provide information on the user journey. The problem is that they take much longer to put up the tags and custom events required to obtain those insights. GA4 even limits the number of custom events you can track, making it difficult to comprehend anything but the most basic of user experiences.

We all know that trips aren't always easy. Out-of-the-box journey analytics speeds up and simplifies setup, allowing you to see client journeys without lengthy labeling.

And we shouldn't just look at which pieces of content lead to conversions. Is it the content or the placement that is causing the clicks? Is my most crucial material being interacted with or even seen? Too much time and effort is invested in developing these properties to ignore. Interaction heatmaps elevate trips by answering these questions.

We should be able to immediately quantify how much incremental revenue we can produce by enhancing the user journey once we understand it. That measured impact should be expressed in a language that every team member understands: cash.

3. Keep consumer information safe and private.

Last but not least, security and personally identifiable information.

We're all moving to GA4 since Universal Analytics failed to take client privacy seriously enough. The market outpaced the product, and the product has yet to catch up. Although GDPR has been in effect in Europe for five years, the future of GA4 compliance remains unknown. We don't know how that will play out, but we do know that the need to protect customer privacy and security is increasing, not decreasing.

Are you ready to supplement your Google Analytics with digital experience analytics?