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What is Google Analytics 4?

Cody Schneider•

If you've been managing a website for a while, you know the name Google Analytics. Now, there's a new version on the block: Google Analytics 4, or GA4. This article breaks down exactly what GA4 is, how it's fundamentally different from its predecessor, and what these changes mean for your data.

What Exactly Is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 is the latest version of Google's web analytics service. It’s not just an update with a few new features, it's a complete redesign from the ground up. Universal Analytics (UA), the version most of us used for years, was built around the idea of sessions and pageviews, which made sense for the desktop-centric web of the early 2010s.

GA4, on the other hand, is built for the current and future digital landscape. It's designed to track users holistically across both websites and mobile apps, giving you a single, unified view of their journey. A core principle of GA4 is its focus on privacy, providing better controls and measurement capabilities in a world with fewer cookies and more regulations.

The Big Shift: GA4 vs. Universal Analytics

Understanding GA4 requires unlearning some of what you knew about Universal Analytics. The foundation of how data is collected and structured has completely changed. Let's look at the most significant differences.

The Event-Based Data Model

This is the single most important change to understand. It’s the entire foundation of GA4.

In Universal Analytics, data was organized around the concept of a session. Within a session, UA measured different types of "hits," like:

  • Pageviews

  • Events (e.g., clicking a button)

  • Social interactions

  • E-commerce transactions

In GA4, everything is an event. A pageview is an event. The start of a session is an event. Clicking a button, downloading a file, watching a video, and completing a purchase are all just different types of events.

Think of it like this:

  • Universal Analytics: A user visit is like a container (the session) where we put different labels (pageviews, events).

  • Google Analytics 4: A user visit is simply a continuous stream of specific actions (events).

This event-based model is far more flexible. You are no longer constrained by the old Category/Action/Label structure for events. Instead, every event has a name (like scroll or purchase) and can be enriched with additional context through parameters. For example, a video_play event could have parameters like video_title, video_duration, and video_percent_watched.

This shift also changes familiar metrics. The most famous example is Bounce Rate, which is gone in GA4. It has been replaced by Engagement Rate. Instead of punishing you for single-page sessions (which could be a good thing, like finding a phone number), GA4 rewards you for engaged sessions. An engaged session is one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least two pageviews.

User-Centric Tracking, Not Session-Centric

Universal Analytics was great at telling you what happened during isolated visits. But if a user visited your site from their phone on Monday, then their laptop on Tuesday, UA often struggled to connect those two sessions to the same person.

GA4 is designed to give you a more complete picture of the entire user lifecycle. It uses a smarter identity model to stitch together user journeys across different platforms and devices. It prioritizes User ID (if you provide one for logged-in users), supplemented by Google Signals (data from users logged into their Google accounts) and the traditional device ID (browser cookies). This helps you better understand how users discover your brand, engage with your content over time, and eventually convert, regardless of what device they’re using at any given moment.

A Completely New Reporting Interface

The first time you open GA4, you might be a little thrown off. The dozens of pre-built reports from Universal Analytics are gone. Instead, the GA4 interface is much leaner, with a focus on high-level summary "report snapshots."

The real power of GA4's reporting lies in the Explore section. This is where you can build custom reports and conduct deep analysis using advanced techniques that were previously only available in the paid version, GA360. While this offers incredible flexibility, it also means there's a steeper learning curve. You’re expected to build the specific reports you need rather than finding them in a collapsed menu.

Built for a Cookieless Future

Privacy is no longer an afterthought. With growing regulations like GDPR and the phasing out of third-party cookies, an analytics tool must be able to function in this new reality. GA4 was built specifically for this.

It doesn't rely exclusively on cookies for measurement and offers more granular data retention controls. It also uses AI-powered modeling to fill in gaps when data can't be collected due to privacy settings or cookie consent choices. This "blended data" approach allows you to get an estimated view of traffic and user behavior even when you don't have a complete dataset.

Must-Know GA4 Features

Beyond the fundamental changes, GA4 comes packed with powerful new features that give marketers and business owners much more capability out of the box.

Enhanced Measurement

In Universal Analytics, if you wanted to track things like users scrolling down a page or clicking a link to another website, you had to ask a developer to add custom code using Google Tag Manager. It was a common source of frustration and delay.

GA4’s Enhanced Measurement changes that completely. You can enable it with a single toggle switch, and it will automatically start capturing a range of important events without any code changes. These include:

  • Scrolls: When a user scrolls 90% of the way down a page.

  • Outbound clicks: Clicks that lead users away from your domain.

  • Site search: What your users are typing into your website's search bar.

  • Video engagement: When users play, pause, or watch embedded YouTube videos on your site.

  • File downloads: When a user clicks a link to download a file (PDF, DOCX, etc.).

This gives everyone, regardless of technical skill, a much richer dataset from day one.

The 'Explore' Hub

As mentioned, this is where the magic happens in GA4. The 'Explore' hub is a workspace for building detailed, custom reports that go far beyond standard metrics. Some of the most popular exploration templates include:

  • Funnel exploration: Lets you visualize the steps users take to complete a specific goal (like making a purchase or filling out a form) and see where they drop off. This is a game-changer for conversion rate optimization.

  • Path exploration: Helps you understand the common paths users take after arriving on your homepage or any other starting point. It's great for discovering unexpected user journeys.

  • Segment overlap: Allows you to compare up to three different user segments to see how they overlap and where there are unique opportunities. For example, you could compare 'Mobile Users' vs. 'Users from Paid Search' vs. 'Converted Users'.

Predictive Metrics & Audiences

Leveraging Google's machine learning, GA4 can analyze your data to predict future user behavior. Based on a user's past actions, GA4 can estimate their likelihood to perform key actions in the future, providing metrics like:

  • Purchase probability: The likelihood a user who has been active in the last 28 days will make a purchase in the next 7 days.

  • Churn probability: The likelihood that a recently active user will not visit your site again in the next week.

Even more powerfully, you can use these predictive metrics to build smart audiences. For instance, you could create an audience of users who are "likely to purchase in the next 7 days" and then target them with a specific remarketing campaign in Google Ads.

Free BigQuery Integration

For data-savvy businesses, this might be the most exciting update. BigQuery is Google's cloud data warehouse. In the past, connecting your Universal Analytics data to BigQuery for deep, unsampled analysis was a feature reserved for enterprise-level GA360 customers, costing tens of thousands of dollars per year.

With GA4, this integration is available to everyone for free (you only pay for BigQuery's data storage and processing costs, which are minimal for most businesses). This means you can export your raw, event-level analytics data and run sophisticated queries to get answers that simply aren't possible within the standard Analytics interface.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics 4 isn’t just an iteration, it's a complete paradigm shift. By moving away from last-decade's session-based tracking to a flexible, event-based model, it gives you a much smarter, more accurate, and more durable way to understand your users. It prepares you for a future that is user-centric, multi-platform, and privacy-conscious.

We know that navigating the new GA4 interface and its 'Explore' hub can be overwhelming at first. To help, we have integrated Graphed directly with Google Analytics 4. Instead of figuring out how to build the right funnel or path exploration report yourself, you can simply ask for what you need in plain English, like "Show me my top 10 landing pages by engaged users and conversions last month," and get an interactive chart in seconds. We help you skip the learning curve and get straight to the insights you need.