Google Analytics 4 | GA4 - What it is, and what are the main changes and benefits for your company?
Updated: 3 days ago
Google Analytics 4 is a powerful marketing tool providing vital information for better marketing decisions.
It represents a new generation of web analysis that has allowed marketers to effectively analyse important metrics about how customers interact with websites, not just track traffic. The change from Universal Analytics to GA4 raised many doubts at the time, but today GA4 is Google's analytics platform for websites and apps: standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data on 1 July 2023 and, from 1 July 2024, access to historical data ended (including for 360 properties), so data that had not been exported was deleted.
Here's what you need to know about GA4.
Google Analytics 4 tracks the entire customer journey across multiple platforms and takes advantage of AI and machine learning to provide more detailed information on how users interact with your website and/or application.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was developed with customer privacy in mind, so it includes privacy controls and behavioural and conversion modelling, which estimate missing data when users do not consent to cookies. This is in response to some of the latest privacy laws, such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). With an approach that prioritises privacy, data measurement across different channels, and artificial intelligence features, GA4 is an advanced tool for making data-driven decisions.
For GA4, all measurements are events. Instead of seeing generalized data, you can now gain a more complete understanding of how users interact with your app and website.
Originally, GA assumed that page views were the most important metric - but when the majority of traffic happens on mobile and apps take on a decisive importance, this is no longer true. The new parameters may have forced a learning curve, a small trade-off when you can access more and better data.
What does this mean for you? You can still view reports at session level, but the ability to break them down by interaction means more detailed reports and insights.
But how does Google Analytics 4 work?
In simple terms, Google Analytics 4 is a free tracking tool offered by Google that shows you how visitors use your site.
For example, imagine you own an e-commerce shop and you want to know how many users visit your site. With the help of Google Analytics, you can see the number of visitors to your shop, where they come from, what device they are using and much more.
To measure a web page, you first need to create a Google Analytics 4 account. Then you need to add a small piece of JavaScript measurement code to your site. This can be done in several ways, but most of today's websites make it easy to integrate with GA4 from scratch in just a few steps. From then on, whenever a user visits a web page, the tracking code will collect pseudonymised information about how that user interacted with the page.
Google Analytics 4 provides information about user behaviour that can be crucial for your business. There are several reasons why you should use GA4.
Here are some of its benefits:
Evaluate your site's performance.
Verify the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Get ideas for what kind of content to create or what products to offer on your site.
Segment users into different groups (such as age, gender, country, device, behaviour, etc.) to identify which ones are most active.
Determine which pages of your site to optimise to increase conversions.
Artificial Intelligence
Google Analytics 4 integrates machine learning and AI. In this way, it can provide you with detailed information about user behaviour.
Google Analytics 4 can keep measuring even when not every user accepts cookies. With Consent Mode implemented and enough data, it uses behavioural modelling to estimate the gaps left by users who decline cookies and shows that data in the "Blended" reporting identity. The requirements for modelling are explained further below.
Through the power of AI, GA4 uses your past data, analyses it and makes useful predictions about future user behaviour. Analysing how users have interacted with your site in the past gives you a degree of insight into how they might interact in the future.
GA4 displays its predictions through its AI metrics, which are as follows:
Churn probability - The chances that a user who has been active in the last 7 days will not be active again in the next 7 days.
Likelihood of purchase - The chances of a user active in the last 28 days logging a specific key event (for example, a purchase) in the next 7 days.
Revenue forecast - The revenue expected from all purchase events in the next 28 days, for users who have been active in the last 28 days.
These metrics are only available if the property has enough data and collects purchase events: within a seven-day period in the last 28 days, at least 1,000 returning users must have triggered the predictive condition (purchase or churn) and at least 1,000 must not have. For purchase probability and revenue forecast, you need to collect the purchase and/or in_app_purchase events, with the value and currency parameters in the case of purchase.
With this collected data, you can create target audiences for remarketing and for future campaigns on Google Ads.
These AI metrics can, for example, help you create an audience made up of website visitors who are likely to return to buy from your e-commerce shop. Or, users who are likely to buy a product in the next 7 days.
Determining the likelihood of such events manually would be almost impossible - which is why including Machine Learning in GA4 is so useful.
Besides predictive metrics, Google Analytics includes automated insights, which detect unusual changes or emerging trends in your data and notify you, and lets you create up to 50 custom insights per property. Since late 2025, Analytics Advisor has also been rolling out: an AI assistant based on Gemini models that lets you ask questions about your data in natural language and get charts, summaries and optimisation suggestions. Availability may vary by account and language.
In 2026, Google Analytics also started measuring traffic that reaches your site through AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, in a dedicated "AI Assistant" channel, which helps you understand how users discover you.
How and where can I access the information provided by Google Analytics?
The Google Analytics platform is all about an interface that allows you to access the data you collect from your website, application, etc. It does this through a set of reports, standard and customised, with real-time or historical data and even predictive data with access to artificial intelligence, which presents you with information reliably and consistently. Let's explore some of these reports now.
Standard reports in GA4
The standard GA4 reports include the " Reports snapshot", a quick overview of performance, the "Realtime" report, as well as report collections such as "Life cycle" and "User". Depending on how the property is set up (for example, properties migrated from Universal Analytics or created with the baseline reports), the "Life cycle" collection groups the customer journey reports: Acquisition, Engagement, Monetisation and Retention.
The Reports Snapshot
This report offers extremely useful information on how your marketing investments are performing:
It provides quick access in the initial "dashboard" or control panel to metrics such as the number of users and specifically new users, allowing you to understand the effectiveness of your marketing investments and how many new users are finding your site. In that same control panel, you can also see the average engagement time and total revenue.
In the cards below you can easily access various important metrics such as the location of your visitors, the ranking of channels from which sessions originate, the most viewed pages, the most triggered events, etc.
The Real-Time Report
The real-time report is interesting for getting a quick overview of what's happening on your site and can help diagnose what might be causing significant traffic spikes. It reports on all users in the last 30 minutes and provides a snapshot of activity.
You can easily see the total number of simultaneous users, as well as an interesting map showing where the activity is taking place and where in the world your visitors are coming from.
It has several very interesting metrics such as users by source, users by audience, the breakdown by device category, which pages are particularly popular at the moment, and which events are taking place.
Lifecycle Reports
A good part of the value of GA4's standard reports lies in the Lifecycle reports. In particular, the Acquisition, Engagement and Monetisation reports contain detailed reports that can provide useful insights for the business.
Acquisition Reports
The Acquisition reporting area focuses on how your visitors get to your site. How are they "acquired"? This includes Acquisition Overview, User Acquisition and Traffic Acquisition, as you can see in the red box below.
The overview:
The overview provides a snapshot of users and sessions and also integrates data from Google Ads and Search Console, if you have configured these integrations for your GA4 property.
The User Acquisition report:
The User Acquisition report includes details on traffic sources based on user activity.
The Traffic Acquisition report:
The Traffic Acquisition report is similar, but focuses on Sessions instead of Users.
Engagement Reports
While Acquisition reports focus on how visitors get to your site, Engagement reports focus on what they do after they arrive.
The standard Engagement reports include an Engagement Overview, Events Report, Key events and Pages and Screens.
Events Report
The Events Report lists all the events that occurred on the site during the period you are analysing.
Key events (formerly conversions)
This section focuses only on the events that you have marked as key events (previously called "conversions"): actions that are particularly important to the success of your business, such as submitting a contact form or making a purchase. To measure a key event, create or identify the event that measures the action and mark it as a key event.
Pages and Screens Report
It includes information on how visitors interact with the most popular pages on your site.
Monetisation reports
Monetisation reports are only relevant to companies that have monetised their website or application. These reports provide valuable information on the performance of monetisation strategies, allowing companies to better understand revenue sources, user behaviour in relation to paid products or services, and the effectiveness of different monetisation approaches. They are essential for adjusting strategies and maximising the financial return of the site or application.
Retention report
This area allows you to analyse how effectively you retain customers. The idea here is to understand whether or not users who come to the site return, and for how long.
User retention by cohort is probably the most valuable graph in the Retention section, as it allows you to analyse how many of your users return to the site the day after they are acquired (1 day), in the following 7 days (7 days) or in the following 30 days (30 days). This graph allows you to understand whether you are managing to retain the interest of your users or not, but, of course, it is very much influenced by the type of business.
There is also a graph with the Lifetime Value of users, and it's important to point out that in Analytics the LTV refers to all users, not just customers, so the figure is much lower than the LTV of your customers, the traditional one. There's also another important difference: in your customers' LTV you take into account the average customer retention time; in Analytics this metric has to do with the period of analysis defined.
There are other reports that we will cover in a different blog post specially dedicated to reporting in GA4.
Event-Based Data Model
The new event-based data model allows you to track every action users take on your domain. This helps you understand how your customers move through the sales funnel.
Google Analytics 4 classifies all actions on the page as "events". These include clicks, downloads, video plays, submissions, among others.
These "events" are used as the central unit for measuring user engagement, as they suggest that an action has been completed on your site.
For example, if you wanted to measure how many people subscribed to your mailing list, you could assign this action as an "event". You could name the event something like "mailing_list_subscription". Every time these actions are carried out on your site, an "event" is recorded.
Once the data has been collated, you can review how many times this particular event has been triggered.
Multi-Platform Analysis
If you have a website as well as an app, you can use GA4 for multi-platform analysis. The tool combines data from your app and website, allowing you to track the user journey on both platforms.
Once you connect your iOS or Android app to Google Analytics 4, unique user IDs are used to track your customers. Data will be collected from each session initiated and sent directly to Google Analytics.
The data collected from apps is very similar to the data collected from your website - "events" such as video views and clicks, as well as conversion tracking, screen views and more.
This information can help you better understand how users interact with the functionalities of your site and application simultaneously.
A single source of data (from a website or application) is referred to as a "data stream" in GA4. This "stream" is the flow of data from a user and a specific platform to their GA4 account.
How GA4 calculates Sessions
With Google Analytics 4, each user is assigned a session ID that remains valid for as long as they are on the site.
This is a significant improvement on Universal Analytics, which used to record new sessions every time a user's time zone crossed midnight. This means that if a user was on your site between 23:59 and 00:01, Universal Analytics would count that 2-minute visit as two separate sessions.
Although this may seem minor, if it occurred regularly enough, it would make your session count massively unreliable. With GA4, if it's past midnight and a user is still on your website, only one session is counted.
By default, a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, a value you can adjust in your web data stream settings. This default also applied in UA.
Engagement rate
GA4 introduced a new metric, the "engagement rate". While UA highlighted bounce rate, GA4 highlights engagement rate, which reflects the percentage of sessions with user engagement. Bounce rate also exists in GA4, as the inverse of engagement rate.
An engaged session is a session that meets at least one of these criteria: it lasts longer than 10 seconds, it has a key event, or it has two or more page or screen views. Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that are engaged.
Attribution Model
The attribution model is the process by which Google Analytics assigns credit to different touchpoints in the sales paths. These "touchpoints" are the steps a user takes before reaching a conversion and can be anything involved in the sales funnel, such as a click on a link in an email advert, or when a user clicks through to your site after an organic search.
In its attribution reports, Google Analytics 4 offers three attribution models:
Data-driven Attribution:
Data-driven attribution distributes credit for each key event based on the data in your property, instead of using fixed rules, and it is the model Google recommends. Because credit is shared across the interactions that contributed, you may see fractional values in your reports.
With this model, key events can be reattributed for up to 7 days after they occur, and you can set the lookback window in the property's attribution settings (Admin > Events).
How data-driven attribution works
Data-driven attribution uses a machine learning algorithm to decide how the credit for each key event is distributed across touchpoints, instead of always giving it to the first or last click.
The other two models are last-click rules:
Last Paid and Organic Click
Last Click Paid and Organic: ignores direct traffic and gives all credit to the last interaction (paid or organic) before the key event.
Note: The first click, linear, time decay and position-based attribution models have no longer been available since November 2023. In 2026, Google also launched, in beta, a conversion attribution analysis report, with views for assisted conversions (last click) and refined funnel analysis (data-driven attribution).
Last Click on Google Paid Channels
Last Click on Google Paid Channels gives all credit to the last Google Ads channel the customer clicked before the key event. If there is no Google Ads click, the model uses Last Click Paid and Organic.
Google Ads and Search Console integrations
By linking GA4 to Google Ads, you can create Google Ads conversions based on your key events, see how those conversions perform, and build remarketing audiences based on users' behaviour on your site or app. Since the end of Universal Analytics, Google Ads bidding and audiences should be based on GA4 key events and audiences.
By linking GA4 to Search Console, you get the Google organic search traffic report, which shows landing pages with Search Console and Analytics metrics and helps you understand which queries bring clicks and how those users behave on your site. To create the link, you need the Editor role on the GA4 property and to be a verified owner of the Search Console property.
Explorations, data retention and BigQuery export
Explorations allow more advanced analysis than the standard reports, with techniques such as free form, funnel, path, segment overlap, user explorer, cohort and user lifetime. Since September 2026, editable drag-and-drop dashboards with visualisations for tracking your KPIs are also available.
Mind your data retention: by default, properties keep 2 months of data for Explorations. On standard properties you can change this to 14 months under Admin > Data retention (360 properties also offer 26, 38 or 50 months for event data). This setting does not affect standard aggregated reports.
You can also export raw event data to BigQuery. On standard properties, the daily export has a limit of 1 million events per day (up to 20 billion on 360 properties). Streaming export has no volume limit but carries costs, as do BigQuery storage and processing, which offers a free sandbox with limits.
Consent Mode v2 and European requirements
If you have visitors from the European Economic Area, you must collect consent and share the consent signals with Google: advertisers must comply with Google's EU User Consent Policy to use ad personalisation and measurement. Consent Mode v2 added the ad_user_data parameter (consent to send user data to Google for advertising purposes) and the ad_personalization parameter (consent for personalised advertising), alongside ad_storage and analytics_storage. If you use a Google-certified consent management platform (CMP), the provider handles the update; if you have your own banner, you must implement Consent Mode v2.
For GA4 to model data from users who decline cookies, Consent Mode must be active on all pages and tags must load before the consent dialog. The property needs at least 1,000 events per day with analytics_storage denied for at least 7 days and at least 1,000 daily users with analytics_storage granted on at least 7 of the previous 28 days, and meeting these numbers does not guarantee eligibility. Modelled data does not support features such as audiences, retention reports, predictive metrics and BigQuery export.
Google Analytics 4 is a powerful analysis tool that offers valuable insights into your audience, where they come from, how they got to you and how they are interacting with your site. There are numerous benefits to GA4, including cross-platform tracking, more control over data, integration with Google Ads and Search Console, and AI-driven insights. If you need help setting up GA4 and getting the most from it, we regularly share more content on analytics, as we think it is a very important tool in digital marketing.
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