What is Google Analytics 4 Data?

Switching from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 can feel like learning a new language. Everything looks different, your favorite reports are gone, and the data itself seems to have been completely reorganized. At the heart of this change is a fundamental shift in how Google measures what people do on your website and in your app. This article will break down exactly what GA4 data is, how it's structured, and what it means for tracking your business performance.

The Fundamental Shift: Why GA4 Data Feels So Different

The single biggest change in GA4 is its data model. Universal Analytics was built around sessions and pageviews, while GA4 is built around events. This might sound like a small technical difference, but it changes everything about how you analyze user behavior.

From a Session-Based Model...

In the old world of Universal Analytics (UA), interactions were sorted into different categories called "hit types." A pageview was one type of hit, a transaction was another, and a social media interaction was yet another. UA cared a lot about grouping these hits into "sessions" - basically, a container for everything a user did in a single visit.

Think of a UA session as a shopping basket. A user arrives at your site, puts things in their basket (pageviews, clicks, purchases), and then leaves. UA was very good at telling you about the basket itself: how many baskets there were, how long they were used, and how many items were in each one. But it was less flexible when you wanted to understand the details of each specific action in isolation.

...To an Event-Based Model

GA4 throws out the concept of different hit types and replaces it with one simple, powerful idea: everything is an event.

• Viewing a page is now a page_view event.
• Starting a new session is a session_start event.
• Scrolling down the page is a scroll event.
• Making a purchase is a purchase event.

Instead of rigid categories, you now have a flexible stream of actions. If a UA session was a predefined shopping basket, GA4 gives you a box of Lego bricks. Each brick is an event, and you can piece them together in endless combinations to tell any story you want about your user journey. This model is much better suited for the modern web, where the user journey might start on a mobile app, continue on a website, and finish on another device. The event stream can capture all of that in one unified view.

The Building Blocks of GA4 Data: Events, Parameters, and Users

To really get a handle on your GA4 data, you need to understand three core components that it's built from. Once you grasp these concepts, the new reports and interface will start to make much more sense.

1. Events: The Actions That Matter

Since everything in GA4 is an event, it's helpful to know they come in a few different flavors. You have full control over what you track, from basic page landings to hyper-specific button clicks.

• Automatically Collected Events: These are the base-level events GA4 tracks for you the second you install the tag, with no extra setup required. Examples include session_start (when a user starts a session), first_visit (when someone visits for the very first time), and user_engagement (when a user stays on a page for a certain time, has a conversion, or views multiple pages).
• Enhanced Measurement Events: You can enable these with a simple toggle in your GA4 admin settings. They track common and useful interactions without you having to write any code. This includes events like scroll (when a user scrolls 90% of the page), file_download, video_start, video_progress, and click (for outbound link clicks).
• Recommended Events: Google provides a list of suggested event names for common scenarios across different industries (like e-commerce, gaming, or travel). For example, instead of naming a purchase event product_bought, they recommend using purchase. Adhering to these names like generate_lead, login, and sign_up allows you to tap into more of GA4's built-in reporting features.
• Custom Events: This is where the real power lies. If there's a specific user action you want to track that doesn't fit into the other categories, you can create your own custom event. Want to know how many times users click your "Request a Demo" button in the header vs. the footer? You can create a unique custom event for each button and track them separately.

2. Parameters: The Context Behind Every Event

An event on its own just tells you that something happened. A page_view occurred, but which page? A file_download occurred, but what was the file name? A purchase occurred, but for how much?

That's where parameters come in. Parameters are the extra pieces of information that add context to every event.

Every event has parameters that come along for the ride. For example, the automatic page_view event includes parameters like page_location (the full URL of the page) and page_title (the title of the page). An enhanced measurement file_download event includes parameters like file_name and link_text.

When you create a custom event, you can also send your own custom parameters. If you track a contact_form_submission, you might include a parameter like form_type with a value of "sales" or "support". To use these custom parameters in your reports, you have to register them in the GA4 interface as "custom dimensions" (for text-based parameters) or "custom metrics" (for numerical parameters).

3. Users and Sessions: Reimagined

While events are the star of the show, users and sessions still exist in GA4 - they're just defined a bit differently.

• Users: GA4 is much better at identifying a single user across multiple sessions and even on different devices. It tries to stitch together a person's identity using three methods in order: User-ID (if you provide a unique, non-identifiable ID when a user logs in), Google Signals (data from users logged into their Google accounts who have consented to ad personalization), and finally, Device ID (browser cookies or app instance ID). This gives you a more accurate user count and a clearer view of the total customer journey.
• Sessions: A session in GA4 starts with the session_start event. GA4 no longer ends a session at midnight or if the user comes back from a different traffic source (two common session-breakers in UA). Instead, a session is now a continuous period of a group of events triggered by a user, it only times out automatically after 30 minutes of inactivity by default (you can adjust this duration in the settings of your data stream configuration).

Navigating the GA4 Interface: Where Does This Data Live?

Knowing the theory is great, but where do you actually apply it? The left-hand navigation in GA4 is organized to guide you through your customer's lifecycle, from awareness to retention.

Reports Section

This is where you'll find your pre-built, standard reports. They give you a quick overview of your site's performance without the need to customize anything.

• Acquisition Report Grouping: These reports help you understand how users arrived at your site or application. This section groups details on your user traffic into a source, such as Google versus your email channel. This report integrates smoothly with your Ads and Search consoles.
• Engagement Report Grouping: Here is where events data takes center stage. It shows what content users engage with or what screens get more viewership, and the different events users trigger (page_view, scrolling, etc.).
• Monetization Report Group: If your business sells products, this section will be invaluable. Monetization shows data about purchases, in-app sales, and advertiser revenue. It breaks down revenue from items, ads, and subscriptions.

Explorations Panel

The Explorations section is where the true potential of GA4 lives. This is a canvas for you to design your own tailored reports and visualizations that are not available in standard ones. It can provide much deeper insights into specific queries about your business, offering a free-form exploration of your data and the visualization of journeys or conversion funnels. Rather than being confined to the metrics provided, Explore lets you drag and drop dimensions and metrics based on any events and parameters you have, creating tables or path charts in the way most useful for your unique analysis needs.

Final Thoughts

In a nutshell, GA4's changes from a session-focused system to an event-driven one mean data that is much more flexible and user-centered. The key ingredients are events, parameters, users, and a new session model that gives us an accurate picture of the entire customer path and more control over the details you track. Gaining confidence with this structure empowers you beyond being just a viewer of standard reports, toward being able to build custom insights and visualizations.

Although an events-based model is strong, creating custom reports in exploration tools to link all the touchpoints might become an effortful task, especially for marketers not accustomed to such BI platforms. It takes time to answer questions from data like which ads drove revenue. We built Graphed to tackle these challenges and provide direct answers. Instead of fighting within drag-and-drop interfaces to get what you need, simply describe your question in a normal sentence, and Graphed will create your live reporting dashboard instantly using connected data sources. This means spending less time on data wrangling and more on finding insights.