Beyond GA4: Advanced Segmentation with SCUBA

In the ever-changing world of digital advertising, staying ahead of the competition is crucial. The recent release of GA4 has been plagued with issues and limitations that hinder ad sellers from reaching their full potential. Google's revenue-driven approach often comes at the cost of both advertisers and users.

A core challenge is that Google's business model does not naturally align with prioritizing privacy; protecting user privacy directly diminishes Google's earnings. SCUBA delivers a superior solution with embedded privacy-enhancing technology purpose-built for real-time times series event data to provide deeper insights and actionable data that empower marketers and ad sellers to make data-driven decisions and optimize their strategies.

Large publishers have expressed the following challenges:

• Data discrepancies and inconsistencies: GA4 collects and processes data differently from Universal Analytics, leading to confusion and concerns about data reliability.
• Steep learning curve: GA4's new interface and features require significant time and effort for users to learn and adapt.
• Missing or altered metrics: Many familiar metrics from Universal Analytics are either missing or changed in GA4, requiring publishers to adjust their analytics strategies.
• Limited standard reports: GA4 has fewer pre-defined reports than Universal Analytics, forcing users to create custom reports, which can be time-consuming.
• Data lag issues: GA4 has longer data processing delays (12-48 hours) than Universal Analytics (4 hours), making real-time decision-making difficult.
• Limited historical data: GA4 stores data for a shorter period, challenging long-term trend analysis.
• Privacy and compliance concerns: GA4 is not fully compliant with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, creating potential legal issues for publishers.
• Difficulty tracking B2B metrics: GA4 needs more capabilities to handle named account tracking and multiple stakeholders, which is crucial for B2B publishers.
• Reduced customization options: GA4 doesn't offer a more streamlined approach to event tracking and customization.
• Interface complexity: Many users need help navigating the GA4 interface, with important features buried within the UI.

One of Google Analytics 4's (GA4) significant limitations is its limited retroactivity regarding audience segmentation. Unlike segments, which can be applied retroactively to historical data, GA4 audiences only start collecting data from the moment they are created. If you create a new audience for GA4, you won't be able to analyze its behavior or characteristics before its creation date. This limitation severely hampers the ability to conduct historical analysis on specific audience groups, making it challenging to understand their evolution over time.

For instance, if you create an audience for users who have completed a specific action on your website, you won't be able to see how that audience behaved in the past before the audience was created. This makes it challenging to identify trends, patterns, or changes in behavior that may have occurred before the audience was defined. As a result, marketers and analysts are limited in their ability to comprehensively understand their audience's behavior and preferences, ultimately impacting their ability to make informed decisions.

SCUBA's real-time decision intelligence platform offers more flexibility, user-friendly exploration, in-the-moment insights, and retroactive analysis. With SCUBA, you can create audiences and apply them retroactively to historical data, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of your audience's behavior over time. This enables marketers and analysts to identify trends, patterns, and changes in behavior that may have occurred in the past, providing valuable insights that can inform future marketing strategies and optimize audience engagement.

By limiting retroactivity, GA4's audience feature falls short of providing the level of insight and analysis that marketers and analysts need to make data-driven decisions. SCUBA's more flexible approach to retroactive analysis, on the other hand, empowers users to gain a deeper understanding of their audience's behavior, preferences, and evolution over time, ultimately driving more effective marketing strategies and better business outcomes.

SCUBA is designed to address these limitations and provide ad sellers with a more comprehensive and flexible insights solution. SCUBA allows you to analyze long-term trends and patterns without worrying about data loss. Its analysis capabilities are also highly customizable, enabling you to perform complex on-the-fly analysis and answer specific business questions with natural language. SCUBA's data models are flexible and can be tailored to meet your business needs, ensuring you get the insights you need to make informed decisions.

One key benefit of using SCUBA is its ability to provide real-time time series data, allowing you to analyze and respond to market changes. With SCUBA, you can easily merge first-party data with other data sources, delivering in-the-moment insights into audience journeys and enabling you to optimize your ad strategies in real-time. This level of granularity also extends to measuring performance across all Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs), providing a comprehensive view of your ad revenue streams.

SCUBA also enables you to drill down into content performance at the content and page level, allowing you to understand which content pieces drive engagement and revenue. Additionally, you can analyze ad unit level performance, identify which ad units perform best, and optimize your ad placements accordingly. With SCUBA's programmatic buying trends analysis, you can stay on top of market trends and adjust your ad strategies to maximize revenue.

Learn more about how SCUBA unlocks revenue growth for publishers at AdExchanges' Programmatic IO event in NYC Sept 24th-25th. 

Schedule time with us at the event: https://info.scuba.io/programmatic-io-pubs24