What is GA4?
GA4, or Google Analytics 4, is Google's current free analytics tool. It replaced Universal Analytics in 2023 and measures your site around events rather than page views and sessions.
The big shift: everything is an event
Universal Analytics thought in pageviews and sessions. GA4 thinks in events: a page view is an event, a click is an event, a purchase is an event. This is more flexible and works across web and apps, but it means the reports, and the setup, look quite different. If you are used to the old Analytics, GA4 feels unfamiliar at first.
What GA4 gives you
- Traffic and audience data: where visitors come from, what they do, which channels drive results.
- Conversions, called key events, that you mark yourself.
- Modelled data to fill gaps left by consent and cookie limits.
What trips people up
Three things, mostly: an event is not a conversion until you mark it as a key event; GA4 reports lag 24 to 48 hours, so new data is not instant; and it only counts what your tags actually send, so a tag that is not firing means a silent gap. Most "GA4 is wrong" complaints trace back to one of these.
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