What You Need to Know: UA vs Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Google officially dropped the new version of Google Analytics, called Google Analytics 4 or GA4 for short and as expect there is a lot different in this upgraded version.
But don’t worry, I’ve gathered all the goods on Universal Analytics (UA) vs Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to help you navigate the new properties! In this post, I’ll walk you through what you need to know including:
How GA4 works
What’s new
What’s no longer available
Next steps (If you’re creating a new account or already have a GA account and want to also set up a GA4 account)
Ready to dive in?
How GA4 Works
To say that GA4 and Universal Analytics (which is the version that most of us know and use) are different is an understatement.
For starters, the new GA4 is built on a completely different tracking and measurement model. Why the big change? Turns out Google Analytics is moving towards a measurement model that supports both websites and Mobile Apps.
They’ve shifted the focus towards Users and Actions (aka Events), as opposed to Visits and Pageviews.
The reason for the move is to make it easier to understand people and their actions across various devices like mobile apps and web properties.
With so many people using a variety of digital devices to consume content these days, it seems like Google’s idea with GA4 is to try and provide more valuable information around how to understand your ‘Audiences’ rather than how to simply understand the ‘Visits’ to your site.
Get to Know GA4’s New Features
Reporting Interface
To be frank, everything inside of Google Analytics 4 is spankin’ new!
Aside from how data is measured (which is in itself a huge difference), the Google Analytics interface has completely changed in this version.
You’ll likely notice first the move from ABC reporting (Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour, Conversion) to data being grouped into Lifecycle, User and Events.
Within these main sections, you’ll have additional information, but the GA4 reports are quite different from the reports you’ve gotten used to seeing in your Universal Analytics account.
Event Tracking
Events may not have been something you spent a lot of time analyzing over in UA - it requires some custom work in order to fully take advantage of the functionality - but in the new GA4, all User Actions are being captured in Events.
Get ready for this section to become your new best friend!
First, if you did have GA Events created on your account, the Event metrics of Total Events, Unique Events and Event Value are no longer available. Sorry.
GA4 will track all actions performed on the website as Events and they’ll differ by their name.
(Ex. event name = page_view or event name = file_download, etc.)
You’ll notice a greater impact if you’ve created GA Events in your Universal Analytics property which you’ll need to also have available in your GA4 property. It will be a more complex integration and unless you’re super familiar with the new tracking functionalities and Google Tag Manager, it’s a good idea to get some support.
If you only focus on looking at Pageviews to analyze the performance of your website, then there’s no need to be as concerned because there is an Event that captures page_views.
You’ll see some differences in the information made available around pageviews in this latest release but before you stress, let’s check out what you can expect in the new GA4 metrics.
GA4 Metrics
It’s not just the interface and the reporting that’s different, Google Analytics 4 is also offering new metrics (note: we’ll be taking a look at all of them in-depth over the coming months).
These metrics include:
Engaged Sessions: defined as users that remained on your property for at least 10 seconds
Engaged Session per User: the number of engaged sessions for each user that comes to your property. You’re going to want to see an increase in this number over time!
Engagement Time: mostly for mobile apps and measures the time that the app is in the foreground
Analysis Capabilities
Path Analysis
What am I most excited about when it comes to GA4? The analysis capabilities! Specifically, Path Analysis.
Previously only available to those with a paid account, these new capabilities are now open to everyone.
In Universal Analytics, you’re offered Behaviour flow and User flow (which to be honest weren’t very insightful) but with the new Path Analysis functionality, you can easily explore the path users take on your property based on a starting point or an endpoint of your choosing.
This is HUGE for understanding how your sales funnel works, or to understand how users who enter your website from a particular location (say your Blog) progress to completing a goal.
You can easily filter/segment this to look at a specific traffic source to understand how a specific marketing channel is performing.
Talk about a WIN!
Funnel Analysis
Similar to Path Analysis, a more robust Funnel Analysis report was available to paid Google Analytics users only. In UA, you could create a funnel but only to understand the completion of the GA Goals you created.
The GA4 Funnels capability is not depending on GA Goals at all.
Now, you have the ability to easily visualize the steps that your visitors take to complete a task and analyze how well the funnel is performing.
This is especially powerful for analyzing your Sales Page performance and the Purchase funnel.
Ecommerce websites are likely to find this new Funnel Analysis report incredibly beneficial too as it will clearly show where exactly in the purchase journey your customers are falling off.
In the GA4 Funnel Analysis report, you’ll also be able to segment/filter your information to look at specific things that are important to you, whether that be traffic source, location, type or user, and so much more.
Segment Overlap
Want the ability to look at the relationship between different audiences or segments that come to your properties?
The Segment Overlap report allows you to compare up to 3 different segments of your audience to see what their relationship is to each other.
Maybe you want to understand what the relationship is between your new users, whether they’re on their mobile device and make a purchase.
For those with both mobile apps and websites, a great segment to understand is the overlap of users across the two platforms.
These are the main key differences in GA4 that unless you’re an Analytics professional you’ll certainly want to take advantage of.
What You Won’t Find in GA4
Metrics and Dimensions
For me, the metric I will miss the most is Bounce Rate. I’m honestly heartbroken over it being gone, but I understand why it’s no longer a fit for this GA4 version.
Bounce rate measured the percentage of your traffic that only saw 1 page and then left your website. This metric was never valid for Mobile Apps and as GA moves to understand Users and how they engage with all your properties (App + Web) this metric is no longer valid.
In order to understand the quality of your traffic (which is what bounce rate was meant to do), you now have the three new metrics introduced above:
Engaged Sessions
Engaged Sessions/User
Engagement Time
These metrics are the most common within the Total Pages report and are also no longer available in GA4:
Pageviews
Unique Pageviews
Page Exit Rate
Page Entrances
While I get how disappointing it can be to see some of your favourite metrics disappear, Google’s obviously made sure that you’ll still get valuable information from your data and the metrics that are no longer available have been removed for good reason.
Similar to metrics, many dimensions have disappeared from GA4. I’m going to miss the Landing Page dimension the most, but the good news is there is a workaround to this dimension being removed using a path analysis.
Of course, there are many others not listed here that Google has removed and my advice is to take an existing Universal Analytics report that you use often and check if you can reproduce it in GA4. You’ll quickly find out what’s gone!
Goals
Google Analytics Goals are no longer available.
You had the ability to identify the completion of a specific action taken by your visitor as a Goal in UA which meant you could then easily see how many times this action was accomplished/completed and could further breakdown this information by things like, traffic source, demographic, User type, etc.
In order to identify an action as a conversion in GA4, it will require you to assign certain Events as conversions.
This is a more complex process and one that I’ll be walking you through in more detail soon!
Profile Views
As of the writing of this post, GA4 did not allow you to create different Views and filter that data accordingly.
Many have filters that remove traffic from themselves or their team members so those visits are not included in the data analyzed, but at the moment, the only way to do this is to create a Segment and go from there.
Time will tell if Google will provide this functionality in the future and what it will look like, but it’s not provided at the moment because it’s not applicable to Mobile Apps!
Your Next Steps
Ok, so now what? What do you need to do next?
Firstly, know that Universal Analytics isn’t going anywhere for a very long time - you don’t need to rush to make the transition over to GA4.
My recommendation is to have both a Universal GA account and a GA4 account for your website.
Why? GA4 is still being optimized. Though it has come out of Beta, there are still key functionalities that are not available in GA4 that Google is working on.
Because it’s also a very different platform (both in how data is being captured and measured and how data is presented), it’s a good idea to take your time getting to know the new interface and creating your reports.
It’s going to be important to compare the numbers between the two versions for your key metrics in order to identify major differences as these could be due to the new measurement model or tracking.
Reminder: You should expect slight differences in data but it should be within a reasonable amount.
Take your time learning the new GA4 version and start playing around with it so you get more comfortable.
I’ll be sharing more information and guidance on specific aspects like:
How to properly set up your GA4 account
What reports to set up that are similar to the key reports you have in Universal GA
How to assign conversions (aka the new Goals)
How to use the Page Analysis, Funnel Analysis reports and the other useful reports now available
The power of GA4 with Google Tag Manager and Data Studio
There might be a lot to take in with UA vs GA4 but the new direction of Google Analytics is super exciting.
Stay tuned for Google adding many more features and functionalities to help you understand how your audience is engaging with your digital properties. All of it is in an effort to help you make informed decisions on what direction or steps to take in your business.
Need support or have specific questions? Leave a comment below or reach out to me here.
If you’d like to chat about transitioning to GA4 for your business, you can book a 30-minute free consultation and we can see what makes sense for you.