Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Definition

Google Analytics 4 is the latest version of Google's free analytics tool, the standard for measuring how people find and use your site. It replaced Universal Analytics in 2023 and models everything as events rather than pageview-based sessions.

In depth

GA4 shifted from the old session-and-pageview model to an event-based one, where every interaction, a page view, a scroll, a click, a form submit, is recorded as an event with its own details. That flexibility lets you measure almost any action and follow users across devices and platforms, but it also means the interface and reports look and behave differently from the Universal Analytics many businesses grew up on. It's free, it integrates tightly with Google Ads, and it's the default analytics layer for most of the web.

For a business, GA4 is where you see which channels send traffic, which pages convert, and how campaigns perform once visitors land. Marked conversions feed back into Google Ads for bidding, and its attribution reports show how channels combine to produce results. Because it's free and connected to the rest of Google's stack, it's usually the practical hub for measurement even when you layer other tools on top.

The catch is that GA4 only tells the truth if it's configured well, the default install captures basic events but rarely the conversions a specific business cares about. We see plenty of accounts where GA4 is technically running but tracking the wrong actions, or where the migration from Universal Analytics broke goals nobody rebuilt. Set up deliberately, it's powerful; left on defaults, it produces confident-looking reports about the wrong things.

Worked example

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