Using Data Processing Delays to Your Advantage in GA4

Author

Himanshu Sharma
November 27, 2024

💥 🤯 🚀 Here is how you can use data processing delays (24 hours to 12 days) to your advantage in GA4 👇

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The 24 hours to 12 days delay in GA4 event reporting may seem inconvenient at first, but it can offer several benefits that can lead to more sales and better ROI.

The delay forces marketers to adopt a "baker" approach rather than a "cook" mentality.

In marketing, bakers make money and cooks get burned.

A baker is a person who carefully plans a marketing campaign before launching it and then waits for it to fully bake (wait for the learning phase to get over and/or achieve statistically significant results) before analyzing its performance and making further changes to it.

On the other hand, a cook is an impatient person who rushes to launch a new campaign and then changes it based on the previous day's performance.

Since a cook lacks patience and wants to cook (make money) as fast as possible, they often make frequent edits to campaigns, launch new campaigns or make marketing decisions based on near real-time data.

Since all major advertising platforms now use machine learning to find audiences most likely to convert, a cook almost always remains stuck in the learning phase and frequently burns dishes.

This is what happens when you try to cook a cake.

The cook actually believes they can outsmart machine learning algorithms, optimize much better than a machine, do better audience targeting and make smart marketing decisions based on near real-time data (which is often incomplete).

So they believe in all things manual: manual optimization, manual placements, manual bidding....

The more you touch your campaign, the worse it gets.

GA4 data processing delays force you to collect statistically significant data and make decisions based on that data.

The delay discourages frequent, knee-jerk reactions to daily fluctuations in performance metrics, which pushes marketers to avoid disrupting the learning phase of campaigns and allows for more stable, data-driven optimizations.

GA4 allows time for machine learning algorithms to work effectively by "forcing a pause in immediate data analysis", which is crucial for platforms that use AI to find the most likely to convert audiences.

This approach aligns well with machine learning algorithms used by advertising platforms, which require "time" to optimize performance.

The delay forces marketers to focus on long-term trends and overall campaign performance rather than getting caught up in short-term fluctuations, which leads to better strategic decision-making and potentially better ROI.

Long story short.

Don't try to cook a cake. Bake it.

Be a baker in marketing.