Experts from Google and Merkle share why analytics will become a strategic priority for UK marketers in 2025, with a look at the tools, strategies and trends shaping success.
Next-generation analytics empower marketers to navigate complexity, prove their value, and ultimately, win / Unsplash
In an era where every marketing investment needs to prove its worth, the ability to accurately measure and analyze performance is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. Marketers are operating in a complex landscape: customer journeys are fragmented across channels, data is abundant yet often siloed, and there’s increasing pressure from finance to demonstrate clear return-on-investment (ROI).
As research from Google, NewtonX, and Project X Initiative reveals, marketing and finance leaders agree that marketing drives long-term growth, but short-term financial pressures often misalign their goals. To bridge this gap and unlock marketing’s true potential, marketers need robust analytics that provide actionable insights, foster collaboration, and drive business outcomes. Enter next-generation analytics that can empower marketers to navigate complexity, prove their value, and ultimately, win.
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The need for future-proofed analytics has driven significant innovation, with artificial intelligence (AI) at the heart of this transformation. Google Analytics (GA, formally known as GA4), for example, represents a paradigm shift, moving beyond traditional session-based tracking to an event-based model that unlocks powerful AI-driven capabilities, making it a powerful ROI engine for marketing success.
“Digital analytics has evolved significantly due to user consent laws and changing behaviors, necessitating modern technologies,” says Eilish McCausland, digital analytics director at Merkle. “Amid rapid changes, neglecting basics can hinder progress. Trustworthy reporting is crucial for accurate data analysis and informed decision-making.”
While the transition to GA from Universal Analytics (UA) required adaptation, the long-term benefits are substantial, enabling marketers to gain deeper insights and drive better results. GA’s AI-driven approach empowers marketers to:
“There was understandably some confusion in those early days,” says Qwan Sumatepimolchai, senior data & measurement account manager at Google. “Marketers had to upskill and navigate key differences between UA and GA, including session-based vs. event-based data model, modeled data from machine learning, and attribution issues due to the changing privacy landscape.”
On hand to help implement and optimize GA was Merkle, a Google Marketing Platform (GMP) partner, who completed over 200 migrations for businesses of all sizes.
“Clients who invested in their GA migration are now benefiting from new features like GA predictive audiences,” says Louise Heaven, product partner at Merkle’s Google Technology Practice. “One retail client leveraged GA audiences in search and programmatic campaigns, achieving a 7% increase in new customer acquisition and a 9% reduction in media spend.”
Since then, Google has invested substantially to fortify GA, with ongoing enhancements that prioritize attribution accuracy and data integrity, ensuring marketers have a reliable foundation for cross-channel insights, and allows them to respect user privacy choices while gaining valuable insights by modeling conversions and user behavior even when consent is not granted.
Beyond privacy, it’s providing a reliable foundation for marketers to make data-driven decisions with confidence:
Merkle predicts continued improvements in advanced analysis and custom reporting, through GA’s integration with BigQuery and first-party data from other sources to capture the full customer journey including interactions with offline channels like in-store visits and customer support calls, and further integration of Google’s AI capabilities for predictive insights, automated recommendations, and even more granular understanding of consumer behavior.
“We expect to see even more intuitive and powerful reporting tools, with a focus on providing consistent data across all of Google’s measurement platforms,” says Heaven. “Our future vision is that GA will become a central hub for multichannel orchestration, for optimizing media spend and activating audiences across all channels, allowing marketers to reach the right customers with the right message at the right time.”
While measuring ROI has historically been a challenge for marketers, advanced analytics will change the game. Ultimately, marketers need a durable, adaptable and holistic measurement platform for all marketing channels that can not only meet their evolving needs, but help them to prove the value of their marketing efforts to wider stakeholders across the business.
“[You can] accommodate them by providing access to reporting and continuously enhancing their setup as new features become available,” says McCausland. “Auditing and reviewing analytics reporting and tag management can potentially save hours of additional work in the long term. Setting up tagging and analytics structures to be robust not only now, but for long-term projects and developments, is essential for futureproofing.”
So what can marketers do to make Google Analytics their growth engine?
“By connecting marketing activities to business outcomes and integrating your first party data, GA provides a clear picture of which campaigns are generating the highest return,” says Sumatepimolchai. “Activating on your insights allows marketers to optimize their spending and maximize their impact. It means that they can move beyond metrics like clicks and impressions and focus on what truly matters: driving revenue and achieving business goals.”
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Google is committed to helping businesses thrive in a privacy-first world. The technology giant works with thousands of businesses and agencies to help them prepare...