GA4 vs Universal Analytics: Switching Over to Google Analytics 4

First, a preview:

Feature
Difference

Data model

In GA4, every interaction is captured as an event. 

Connection to BigQuery

Users can export data in GA4 for free. 

Data limits

GA4 does not have any limits on monthly hits. 

Updated metrics

GA4 has many new metrics and others that have been redefined.

Privacy consent

GA4 maximises data collection while complying with privacy laws. 

Event tracking

GA4 offers four different types of events. 

Reports

GA4’s simplified dashboard makes it easier to spot trends and data irregularities. 

Attribution

GA4 offers three different types of attribution models. 

Now a closer look:

Data Model

With Universal Analytics, hit types included page hits, event hits, eCommerce hits, and social interaction hits.

GA4 is event-based. That means any interaction is captured as an event.

This change switches the focus from engaged sessions and pageviews to the user journey.

GA4’s events are separated by an event_name parameter and additional parameters in the form of custom dimensions and properties that describe them. Each parameter has to be registered with the GA4 interface. It’s possible to add up to 25 parameters per event. GA4’s event parameters offer 100.

This option improves the reporting capabilities, especially for funnel and pathways analysis.

It allows for stitching and sequencing of events and pageviews which makes it easier for users to discern valuable insight from the data.

This is what that might look like:

Connection To BigQuery

BigQuery is a data warehouse that allows users to process SQL queries at high speeds. With Universal Analytics (UA), users had to pay to upgrade to Google Analytics 360 in order to export raw data to BigQuery.

That was an expensive product.

GA4 allows users to export raw data, free of charge. You pay for the data storage and the data querying that exceeds the limits of Google Cloud free tier.

You will only be charged after you exceed 1TB of querying per month and 10GB of storage.

Data Limits

The Universal Analytics free version had a limit of 10 million hits per month. This meant that companies often had to work with incomplete information because they had to rely on sampled data.

GA4 has a limit on the number of different events that can be captured (500) but it does not have any limit on the number of monthly hits. That is why many companies have chosen to make the transition to GA4 as soon as possible.

Updated Metrics

There are a number of key differences between UA metrics and GA4 metrics.

Some weren’t available in UA and are entirely new in GA4, while for others, Google has simply changed the definition or the way they’re calculated.

Here are 12 updated metrics you can use in GA4 to understand your users and their behaviour:

Users: The number of users who have interacted with your website or launched your app for the first time.
Sessions: GA4 creates a Session ID to determine where each session came from. That helps with the user journey. The session ends after more than thirty minutes of inactivity.
Engagement rate: Measures the rate of sessions that lasted longer than ten seconds and had a conversion event or at least two pageviews.
Bounce rate: This metric is the inverse of the engagement rate (and it’s back after it initially looked like Google would leave it out of GA4). If the user visits your page, views it for less than 10 seconds, then leaves without visiting another page or triggering another event, the session counts as a bounce.
Average engagement time: Shows the average time the visitor used your web page or app.
Views: GA4 counts the total number of app screens of webpages your user saw.
Event count: Every hit on the website is counted as an event. The events themselves are distinguished by parameters. That means every step of the user journey will be part of the event count, right up until the conversion.
UTM term and UTM ad content: These metrics are available in Explorations, Reporting, and Audience Builder. Both parameters have a user-scoped and session-scoped dimension. They are used to measure which term (i.e. keyword) and which content (i.e. CTA) are most effective in drawing visitors to your website.
Conversion rate: This metric consists of a user conversion rate and the session conversion rate. The first is the rate of users who triggered a conversion event. The session conversion rate is the percentage of sessions in which any conversion event was triggered.
Lifetime value: Identifies which users are the most valuable to your business. It shows you where the users came from, how much time they spent on your website, and how much money they spent. Based on this information, you can choose to spend your budget on the most effective marketing channel for your business.
Total revenue: Displays the combined revenue from subscriptions, purchases, and advertising.
Advertiser ad clicks: Shows the number of times users clicked on your ad.

Privacy Consent

Countries are adopting different regulations when it comes to privacy tracking.

The EU has GDPR, and California has CCPA.

Consumers are increasingly rejecting data tracking. In the European Union, 30-40% of consumers are declining cookie tracking on retail sites.

While this is arguably great for security-conscious users, it throws in a few extra curveballs for the noble marketer.

Google refers to GA4 as “privacy by design”. The plan is to maximise data collection while playing by the rules.

Event Tracking

Automatically Collected Events

Automatically collected events are the events that GA4 tracks by default. The list of website events is:

First visit: Records when the user first opens the website or the app.
Session start: When the user engages with the website or the app.
User engagement: Starts tracking after the user has used the website or app for more than 10 seconds.

Enhanced Measurement Events

Enhanced measurement events is an option designed to give marketers the chance to capture as many different events as possible. This feature is also enabled by default and will track:

Page views
Scroll
Outbound link click
Site search
Video engagement
File download

Users can disable or enable each event individually based on their needs.

Recommended Events

This type of event is used if the first two categories don’t fulfil all your tracking requirements. Google has published several pages of recommendations for different types of websites based on:

Retail/Ecommerce
Travel/Hotel
Games

Unlike the first two types, recommended events aren’t enabled by default. Users have to manually implement them because they require additional context to be useful to the users.

Google has supplied a list of recommended events. For this type to work, marketers must use the exact same event and parameters as outlined by Google. You can check out the entire list of recommended events here.

Customised Events

The users define these types of events. They should only be used in case none of the above-listed event categories apply to the company’s use case.

That’s because most custom events don’t show up in standard reports. Companies have to create customer GA4 reports to conduct a meaningful analysis.

Reports

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to track users as they engage with your company on different platforms.

That’s where GA4’s enhanced machine learning comes into play. It helps to bridge the missing data gap between platforms, so you can keep following the data trail.

GA4’s simplified reporting interface also makes it easier for marketers to spot trends and irregularities in data.

Instead of a list of standardised reports that try to cover every use case, GA4 uses overview reports in summary cards.

There are three main types of reports:

Homepage report
Realtime report
Life cycle reporting

The Homepage Report is the report users first come across when they log into GA4. It reports on overall traffic, conversion, and revenue. The homepage report will tell you where your users are coming from, which campaigns are the most effective, and which web pages and app screens are receiving the most views.

The Real-Time Report focuses on the immediate data. It shows events that happened in the last 30 minutes. These reports are used to analyse the immediate reactions to new content, company news, etc. If your company releases a new product to the public, you can enjoy a “live stream” of your website and app traffic.

The Lifecycle report is the exact opposite of the real-time report. It focuses on the entire user journey. It is meant to offer companies information about how the users accessed their website, what they did once they got there, and how many of them became customers.

Attribution

Attribution is the act of assigning credit for conversions to different ads or clicks on the user’s path to completing a conversion.

It is meant to give marketers insight into which touchpoints and digital marketing channels are triggering the greatest number of conversions.

An attribution model can be a rule, a set of rules, or an algorithm designed to determine how credit for these conversions can be assigned.

In GA4, there are three types of attribution models:

Data-driven attribution
Cross-channel rules-based model
Ads-preferred rules-based model

Data-Driven Attribution

Each data-driven attribution model is specific to each marketer and conversion. It uses machine learning algorithms to evaluate different user paths, those that end in conversions and those that don’t.

The model considers factors like:

Time from conversion
Device type
Number of ad interactions
The order of ad exposure
Type of creative assets

Based on these factors, the model attributes conversion credits to touchpoints most likely to drive conversions.

Cross-Channel Rules-Based Model

This model ignores the traffic. It focuses exclusively on the last channel the customer clicked on before they converted.

Ads-Preferred Rules-Based Model

This model focuses on the last Google Ad the user clicked on before they converted and attributes all the conversion credits to that touchpoint.

If there were no Google Ads in the user’s journey, this model reverts to the cross-channel rules-based model.

Improved Insight And Machine Learning

GA4 offers Analytics Intelligence which represents a set of features that uses machine learning and custom conditions that help you understand and act on your data. 

GA4 digital analytics offers features such as: 

Features
Details

Real-time tracking

GA4 is more advanced than UA because it shows real-time users both demographically and geographically
Device filtration shows where users come from 

Data streams

GA4 provides data streams for page views, scrolls, video, and outbound
All this data can be monitored from a single GA4 platform

Machine learning

Generates Google Ads forecasts based on the probability of conversions
Helps detect anomalies in reports

Customer journey

GA4 is focused on customer journeys
Highlights channels that generate the most customers 
Allows companies to plan their campaigns based on user behaviour

User information

GA4 advanced machine learning alerts users when their routine activity is compromised
Collects data from both apps and websites at the same time
Companies don’t have to use plug-ins to collect user information

Greater Accuracy

When you set up GA4, especially if you run it together with UA for a while, you may notice that GA4 offers a far greater level of accuracy in its tracking.

That’s because companies will gain access to information about how consumers are interacting with their app and website content.

Universal Analytics used the bounce rate as a metric to measure idle visits. GA4 calculates bounce rate more carefully, representing all sessions that weren’t directly engaging with content:

UA
GA4

Bounce rate calculation
% of single page visits with 0 interaction
% of sessions with 0 engagement

Explanation
Someone opens your homepage and has it sitting on another tab for a few minutes, they don’t click on anything.
GA4 defines engagement as:

10+ seconds
1+ conversions
2+ page views

This option provides clearer insight into whether visitors are actually exploring your website and interacting with your brand – not simply whether they visit.

GA4’s tracking will answer those questions and provide companies with a far more granular overview of the entire customer journey.

Cross-Device, Cross-Platform Tracking

When it comes to GA4 vs Universal Analytics, one of the biggest advantages GA4 has is the ability to track the user journey across devices and platforms.

With Universal Analytics, organisations had to use one tool for their websites and another for their apps.

GA4 combines those two tools into one.

With cross-platform tracking, activity is attributed to the same user regardless of the platform. That keeps the tracking numbers far more accurate.

Clean UI For Marketers And Analysts

Compared to Universal Analytics, GA4 offers marketing the chance to store all of their most valuable data in the same place.

Another improvement is the search bar that allows users to execute data analysis and look up reports quickly. It has become far easier for marketers to dive into user reports by aligning report menu sections with the customer journey.

Another advantage of GA4 is that the Analysis Hub, previously only available in GA 360, is now available to anyone who adopts GA4.

Universal Analytics also focused on Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour, and Conversion menus. GA4 has replaced them with the Lifestyle section. This is divided into Acquisition, Engagement, Monetisation, and Retention.

Brand New Data

Two things new GA4 users should know: Event tracking is not retroactive.

Yep. GA4 only starts tracking a certain metric after you’ve enabled it.

Less Advanced Standard Reporting

Universal Analytics had a collection of pre-made reports that were designed to analyse online activity.

GA4 seemed to have been designed to collect a lot of data, but the analysis itself is supposed to take place outside the platform with BigQuery, for example.

Universal Analytics offered thirty standard reports with the Acquisition reporting column, though eleven of them were specific to Google Ads which many people did not use.

GA4 offers only three. For many, that’s not enough to fully understand the big picture.

Shorter Data Retention

Universal Analytics allowed companies to retain their data for an unlimited time.

With GA4, the default setting is two months, but it can be raised to 14 months.

That doesn’t mean that all your data will simply be deleted. Thankfully, there are exceptions.

Users can view conversion data going back further than 14 months. The same applies if you use a custom segment or add a secondary dimension in an aggregated report.

Steep Learning Curve

There are a lot of differences between GA4 and UA. Different metrics, different interfaces, different dashboards, and most of the standard reports are not available.

Marketers have to get used to thinking about their campaigns in an entirely different way. And then they must learn to navigate the software to set up the events they want to track and track them properly.

As a result, this has led to some interesting reactions:

GA4 does have a steep learning curve. But that’s all the more reason for marketing teams to adopt it as soon as possible. It’s the only way to ensure they will be ready to use the software when UA is sunsetted.