Is Google Analytics 4 Good?

If you've recently logged into Google Analytics and felt like the entire platform changed overnight, you aren't imagining things. The switch from the familiar Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 was one of the biggest shifts in web analytics in years, leaving many marketers and business owners asking a simple question: Is GA4 actually any good?

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

The answer isn't a simple yes or no. GA4 is incredibly powerful, but it requires a completely new way of thinking about your data. This article breaks down the good, the frustrating, and the practical ways you can make GA4 work for you.

Why Does Google Analytics 4 Feel So Different?

The main reason GA4 feels so strange is that it's built on a fundamentally different measurement model than Universal Analytics. To understand the change, think of it like this:

• Universal Analytics (UA) was based on sessions and pageviews. It measured "visits" to your website. Everything, from goals to e-commerce transactions, was tied to a user session. It was like counting how many people came into your store and what aisles they visited.
• Google Analytics 4 is based on events and users. It measures specific "actions" a user takes. A page view is an event, a button click is an event, a form submission is an event, and a purchase is an event. It’s no longer about the visit itself, but about the specific things a person does during their entire relationship with your business, whether on your website or in your app.

This "event-based" model is a huge leap forward. It was designed to give a more complete picture of the customer journey across multiple platforms (like a website and a mobile app) and to adapt to a future with fewer cookies. But for those of us who grew up with UA, it means the reports we relied on are either gone or look completely different.

The Good: What GA4 Gets Right

Despite the steep learning curve, GA4 introduces some powerful features that were either impossible or required advanced setups in Universal Analytics.

Flexible, Cross-Device Tracking

Because GA4 focuses on users and events instead of sessions tied to a single device, it's far better at following a single user's journey from their phone to their laptop. If someone discovers your brand through an ad on their mobile app and later makes a purchase on their desktop, GA4 is better equipped to connect those dots into one cohesive user story. This gives you a more accurate view of how all your marketing channels contribute to a final conversion.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Powerful Custom Reporting with 'Explore'

The standard reports in GA4 can feel limited, but the true power lies in the "Explore" tab. This is a robust report-building suite that lets you create totally custom analyses that simply weren't possible in UA for most users.

Some things you can do in Explore:

• Funnel Exploration: Visualize the steps users take to complete a task (like checking out or signing up for a trial) and see exactly where they drop off. Unlike UA, you can build these funnels on the fly using any combination of events.
• Path Exploration: See the exact paths users follow after landing on a certain page or completing an action. This is great for understanding user behavior and an improvement on UA's old Behavior Flow reports.
• Segment Overlap: Compare how different user segments (e.g., mobile users vs. desktop users, visitors from Facebook vs. Google) overlap and behave.

While this requires more initial effort, it allows you to get much deeper insights tailored to your specific business questions.

Automated and Enhanced Measurement

Out of the box, GA4 can automatically track key user interactions without requiring you to set up special tags. With "Enhanced Measurement" toggled on, GA4 will track events like:

• Page views
• Scrolls (when a user reaches 90% of a page)
• Outbound clicks
• Site search
• Video engagement
• File downloads

In UA, tracking most of these required custom setup in Google Tag Manager. Now, you get richer behavioral data from day one, giving you a better sense of how users engage with your content beyond just viewing a page.

Free BigQuery Integration

This is a game-changer for data-savvy businesses. BigQuery is Google's cloud data warehouse. GA4 allows you to export your raw, unsampled event data directly into BigQuery for free. This gives you complete ownership and control over your data, allowing for incredibly granular analysis and the ability to join your analytics data with information from other sources, like your CRM. Before, this was an enterprise-level feature costing thousands of dollars per year.

The Not-So-Good: Where GA4 Can Be Frustrating

Of course, the transition hasn't been without its pain points. Many users find GA4 confusing and unintuitive, and for good reason.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

The Overwhelming Learning Curve

Let's be honest: finding a simple report in GA4 can feel like a scavenger hunt. The interface is completely different, reports have new names, and common metrics like Bounce Rate are gone (replaced by the more nuanced "Engagement Rate"). Everything users had learned and memorized in UA for years went out the window, and getting up to speed takes significant time and effort.

Fewer Pre-Built Standard Reports

Where UA offered dozens of standard, out-of-the-box reports, GA4 is far more bare-bones. Want to quickly see a landing page report with conversion data? In UA, it was a few clicks away. In GA4, you often have to build it yourself in the "Explore" section. This shift from a "reporting tool" to an "analysis tool" empowers advanced users but can be a major hurdle for teams who just need a quick, high-level overview.

Data Processing Delays

In GA4, data in standard reports can sometimes take 24-48 hours to be fully processed and finalized. While real-time reports exist, they are limited. This can be frustrating for marketers who need to check the performance of a brand-new campaign and make rapid decisions. Universal Analytics often felt much more immediate in this regard.

How to Make GA4 Work for You

So, is GA4 good? Yes, but you have to approach it differently. Stop trying to recreate your old UA dashboards and instead embrace the new model. Here’s a practical way to start.

1. Start with Your Questions, Not Reports

Instead of searching for your old favorite report, start by writing down the actual business questions you need to answer. For example:

• "Which marketing channels are driving the most newsletter signups?"
• "What are the top 5 pages that users visit right before making a purchase?"
• "How many new users from our latest Facebook campaign actually watched our demo video?"

Framing your needs as questions will guide you to the right place in GA4, which is likely the "Explore" tab.

2. Learn to Love the 'Explore' Tab

Think of the standard reports as a quick health check, but consider the "Explore" tab your main workspace. Start with a simple "Free-form" exploration. Try dragging "Session source / medium" into the rows, "Sessions" and "Conversions" into the values, and see what you get. Just by experimenting with different dimensions and metrics, you'll slowly start to understand how the new data model works.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

3. Create Events That Matter to Your Business

Leverage the event-based model. Think about the most important actions a user can take on your site and create custom events for them. This might be quote_request, trial_signup, or contact_form_submit. Once you start tracking the actions that directly map to your business goals, GA4's data becomes infinitely more valuable.

4. Customize Your Reporting Navigation

Did you know you can customize the left-hand navigation in GA4? If you've built a few custom "Explore" reports that you check often, you can add them to your main report library. This helps make the interface feel more tailored to your needs and puts your most important data just a click away.

Final Thoughts

So, is Google Analytics 4 good? The answer is a qualified yes. It's a true analysis platform, not just a reporting dashboard. It forces you to be more deliberate about what you measure and pushes you to ask smarter questions about your data. While the initial learning curve is tough, the potential for deeper, more meaningful insights into your customers is worth the effort.

While getting comfortable in the new GA4 interface is a valuable skill, teams don’t always have time to build custom reports from scratch just to get a simple answer. That's why we built Graphed to help. We connect directly to your GA4 data - along with other sources like Google Ads, HubSpot, and Shopify - so you can get insights using plain English. Simply ask a question like, "Show me a chart of our top landing pages by conversions this month," and we'll instantly generate the visuals you need, connecting data from all your platforms so you see the complete picture.