Why is Google Analytics 4 Better Than UA?
The switch from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 was complicated, but what you got in return is a much more powerful and flexible analytics platform. While the new interface took some getting used to, the underlying changes are built for how marketing and user behavior actually work today. This article breaks down the key upgrades and explains why GA4's approach is a huge step forward for understanding your audience.
The Fundamental Shift: Events Over Sessions
The biggest change between UA and GA4 isn't just the interface, it's the entire measurement philosophy. Understanding this shift is the first step to seeing why GA4 is a superior tool for modern analytics.
How Universal Analytics Worked: The Session-Based Model
Universal Analytics was built around the concept of sessions and pageviews. A session was a container for all the actions a user took on your website within a specific time frame (typically 30 minutes of activity). Within that session, UA tracked "hits." These hits could be:
Pageviews (a user loading a page)
Events (like a button click you manually configured)
Transactions (an e-commerce purchase)
This model worked well for a while, especially when the internet was mostly made up of simple, multi-page websites. But it had limitations. It treated a pageview as the most important action and struggled to make sense of user behavior on modern single-page applications, dynamic content, or mobile apps where the concept of "loading a new page" is less relevant.
How GA4 Works: The Event-Based Model
GA4 throws out the old session-based hierarchy and treats everything as an event. There's no longer a distinction between a pageview, a transaction, or a custom click, they are all just different types of events.
Here are a few examples of default events in GA4:
page_view: A user views a page (this still exists, but it's just one event among many).
session_start: The start of a new session.
first_visit: The first time a user visits your site or app.
scroll: A user scrolls at least 90% of the way down a page.
click: A user clicks a link that leads away from your current domain.
purchase: A user completes a purchase.
Think of it this way: Universal Analytics was like counting how many people came into your physical store and how long they stayed. GA4 is like tracking every single thing they do inside - browsing a specific aisle, trying on an item, asking a question, and finally checking out. You get a much richer, more detailed narrative of the entire customer journey.
This event-based model is far more flexible and accurately reflects how users interact with modern digital properties. It gives you a more granular view of what people are actually doing, not just which pages they're looking at.
Cross-Platform and Cross-Device Tracking Made Simple
One of UA's most significant weaknesses was its inability to easily track a single user across different platforms, like from your website to your mobile app. With GA4, this is a core part of its architecture.
The Disconnected View in UA
In the UA world, if a user visited your blog on their desktop and later opened your iOS app on their phone, UA would almost always count them as two separate users. There was no easy way to connect the dots and understand that this was the same person interacting with your brand on different devices. This led to inflated user counts and an incomplete picture of the customer journey.
GA4's Unified View with Data Streams
GA4 introduces the concept of Data Streams. A single GA4 Property can contain multiple data streams - one for your website, one for your iOS app, and one for your Android app. All the data flows into one central location, allowing Google's various identity methods to stitch user journeys together.
This means you can finally start answering questions like:
Which ad campaigns on the web drive the most app installations?
Do users who read our blog on desktop later convert on the mobile app?
What's the full, cross-platform path to purchase for our most valuable customers?
This unified view is critical. Today's customer journeys are fragmented and nonlinear. GA4 gives you a way to follow them across the different touchpoints they use to interact with your business.
Goodbye, Bounce Rate. Hello, Engagement Rate.
The "Bounce Rate" metric in Universal Analytics was one of the most popular yet widely misunderstood metrics. GA4 replaced it with something far more useful and meaningful.
The Problem with Bounce Rate
A "bounce" in UA was defined as a session with only a single pageview. If a user landed on your blog, read an entire 2,000-word article, got the exact answer they needed, and then left, UA considered that a bounce. This made the metric misleading. A high bounce rate could mean your content wasn't engaging, or it could mean your content was so good that users found their answers immediately and didn't need to click further.
GA4's Smarter Alternative: Engagement Rate
GA4 does away with Bounce Rate entirely and introduces Engagement Rate. This metric is designed to measure meaningful interactions. An "engaged session" is defined by any of the following criteria:
The session lasts longer than 10 seconds (you can adjust this timing)
The session includes at least one conversion event
The session includes at least two pageviews
Engagement Rate is the percentage of sessions that met one of these conditions. It's a much better indicator of user interest. Instead of penalizing a user for finding what they needed on a single page, it rewards you for content that holds a user's attention. This shifts the focus from "how do we get more clicks?" to "how do we create more value for our visitors?"
Unlock the Future with Predictive Analytics
This is where GA4 truly leaves UA in the dust. Universal Analytics was great for telling you what happened in the past. GA4 uses machine learning to start predicting what will happen in the future.
As long as your property collects enough data, GA4 can generate predictive metrics and audiences. The three main ones are:
Purchase Probability: The likelihood that a user who was 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 or app in the next 7 days.
Predicted Revenue: The expected revenue from all purchases in the next 28 days from an active user.
This is a massive upgrade. Instead of just reporting on yesterday's conversions, you can build audiences based on what users are likely to do next. For example, you can create an audience of users with a high purchase probability who haven't bought yet and target them with a specific Google Ads campaign offering a discount. Similarly, you can create a remarketing campaign aimed at high-value users who are at risk of churning.
This capability bridges the gap between analytics and action, turning data into a proactive marketing tool.
Build the Reports You Actually Need
While UA was packed with dozens of pre-built reports, many users felt confined by them. Customization was limited, and digging deeper often required exporting data to another tool. GA4 flips this around, giving you powerful, flexible reporting tools right inside the platform.
The star of the show is the Explore section (formerly called the Analysis Hub). This is a free-form report builder where you can drag and drop dimensions and metrics to build the exact visualizations you need. It's essentially a lightweight BI tool baked into Google Analytics. Key exploration types include:
Free Form Exploration: Lets you build completely custom tables and charts to uncover relationships in your data. It's perfect for when standard reports don't answer your specific questions.
Funnel Exploration: A huge improvement over UA's goal funnels. You can quickly visualize the steps users take to complete a key journey (like checkout or sign-up) and see exactly where they drop off.
Path Exploration: See the most common paths users take after starting a session or triggering a specific event. This helps you understand how users navigate your site beyond the simple "previous page/next page" view.
While GA4 definitely has a steeper learning curve than UA, the trade-off is immense power and flexibility. You’re no longer limited to Google’s pre-canned reports and can finally investigate your data in a way that makes sense for your unique business goals.
Automated Tracking That Works Out-of-the-Box
One of the quietest but most impactful improvements in GA4 is "Enhanced Measurement."
In Universal Analytics, if you wanted to track things like scroll depth, outbound clicks, video plays, or file downloads, you typically needed to set up custom event tracking using Google Tag Manager. This added another layer of complexity that was often a barrier for non-technical users.
With GA4, many of these common interactions can be tracked automatically just by flipping a switch. When you set up a web data stream, Enhanced Measurement is enabled by default and will automatically capture events like:
Scrolls (when a user reaches the bottom of a page)
Outbound clicks
Site search queries
Video engagement (plays, progress, and completion for embedded YouTube videos)
File downloads.
This massively lowers the barrier to entry. From day one, you start collecting richer behavioral data without needing any custom configuration, giving you far more insight right out of the box.
Final Thoughts
The transition to Google Analytics 4 was a significant change, but its modern foundations in event-based tracking, cross-platform unification, predictive AI, and flexible reporting make it a far superior tool. GA4 is built for the complexity of today's customer journeys, moving beyond just counting pageviews to help you understand a user's full story across all your digital properties.
While GA4 does a great job of unifying your website and app data, we found most marketing and sales stories still live in different places like Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce. That's why we built Graphed that connects to all your platforms (including GA4) and lets you build real-time dashboards using plain English, so you can see your full customer journey in one place.