Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics

GA4 is NOT a UA upgrade. See the major differences in setup, data collection, and terminology.

GA4 Setup is Different

The GA4 setup has many more steps to it.

With UA, you basically just had to:

• create a new property
• add your site’s URL in a couple of places
• add the tracking code on your site

With GA4, you need to:

• create a new property
• create a Data Stream
• configure the privacy collection settings
• create the master tag
• add the tracking code on your site

GA4 Tracking Focus is Different

UA tracked hits. GA4 tracks the visitor and what actions they took on your site.

The focus of data collection on UA is:

• Page Views
• Sessions

GA4 data collection focus is:

• Users
• Events

2 Scopes in GA4

In UA, all hits to your site are treated as one Scope – someone or something opened a post/page on your site.

In GA4, there are two Scopes:

• User – who opened a post/page on your site
• Session – where that User came from and what they did on your site

GA4 User Tracking is Different

In UA, you see total page hits and sessions regardless of whether those visitors are new to your site or part of your returning tribe.

GA4 tracks Users by their IP address.

And then it can breaks that User data down into:

• First User (same as New User)
• Returning User
• Active User
• Total User

So, a first time visitor could be tracked as First, Active, and Total.

The Metric you use in your GA4 reports determines the page hits you see. And this is another reason why your GA4 data doesn’t match your UA data.

Event Counts are Radically Different in GA4

Events are the actions a visitor takes while on your site.

There are 156 Events that GA4 tracks including:

• session_start
• page_view

These 2 are going to fire every time a visitor comes to your site.

That means for every report that shows total Event count, you need to divide by 2.

So, looking at total Event count is useless. And unfortunately, a lot of the default reports are based on First User and Total Event Count. That’s NOT the data most site owners want to see!

Click Tracking for the Win

However, GA4 natively tracks something UA does not, which are clicks.

You need to know which posts/pages are garnering clicks for you, especially outbound clicks to your sales pages or affiliate links.

In UA, you have the Behavior Flow, which shows you a visitor’s path through your site.

GA4 does not have Behavior Flow. But, it does have a Path Report that is similar to Behavior Flow, it is just not automatically generated for you. And you can still see where visitors clicked internally.

But, if you make a custom Explore report in GA4, you can even see which link was clicked on which page too. And, you can add a Custom Dimension to see only your affiliate link clicks ina  custom report as well.

Bottom line, this means that in GA4 you can see which posts/pages are making you the most money.

Creating Conversions is Easy in GA4

GA4 makes it super easy to mark an Event as a Conversion.

That means you can easily see click tracking, or landing page hits or such in your GA4 reports as Conversions and see if visitors are going where you hope they will go on your site.

New Terminology

Sessions

You can still see things like Sessions in GA4.

But Sessions are now under what’s called Session Scope. The other new Scope in GA4 is User Scope.

And for Sessions, it just means that something or someone opened a post/page on your site.

What you really want to look for are the new metrics that let you drill down into what happened during that Session, like:

• Engaged Session – which are Sessions that lasted for more than 10 seconds
• Average Engagement Time per Session – which is duration
• Events per Session – meaning that action was taken by the visitor on that visit

Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate was a late comer to GA4. And it is nothing like Bounce Rate in UA.

In UA, Bounce Rate means that someone visited one page/post on your site and then left your site.

In GA4, Bounce Rate is the inverse of Engagement Rate. It means that the visitor hit a page/post on your site and left within 10 seconds without taking any action, like scroll or click.

Groupings are Different in GA4

In UA, when you viewed your Acquisition reports, you saw lumped together metrics for individual sources, like Pinterest.

But in GA4, the lumping together is called Channel Grouping. And they are for things like Organic Social, which lumps together all social channels.

When you change the Dimension to Source, you can see an individual listing.

But, and this is key, when you see pinterest.com as a Source, that is only one of many Pinterest sources. There are also sources for pinterest.jp, which is Japan, pinterest.au, which is Australia, and so on.

Same with Facebook. There are at least 11 different Facebook sources such as facebook.com, m.facebook, and so on.

And this is just one more reason why some site owners complain that their UA data does not match their GA4 data.

Fortunately, it’s easy to build a custom Explore report to show hits from every flavor of a single social platform, or even from a single search engine. And, you can even create a report to show which page is your top performer from each platform too.

Is Google Analytics 4 Better Than Universal Analytics?

Yes and no.

Yes GA4 is Better

GA4 gives you a deep, rich look into what your site visitors are doing on your site.

This helps you track conversions and see exactly which posts/pages are working the best for you and which ones need help.

But, it does require that you learn to build custom reports. Those are super easy once you have a basic understanding of them.

I built 20+ custom reports in less than an hour.

No GA4 is Not Better

There are some things that GA4 is missing that we used heavily in UA.

Behavior Flow is gone in GA4. The underlying mechanism is in GA4 to generate, as demonstrated by the Path Report. But it does not dynamically generate it for you.

You literally HAVE to build custom reports, as the default reports focus so squarely on First User metrics. And while it’s great to see new users to your site, you do need snapshots of total user visits.

The Silver Lining with GA4

Goggle Analytics 4 is in active development.

And as more site owners adopt it and demand some of the same reports and functions they counted on in Universal Analytics, Google will hopefully use that feedback to improve GA4.

Personally, I REALLY like the ability to create custom reports in just a few minutes with GA4.

That allows me to quickly set up tracking for important metrics as I add things to my site, like a new landing page, or a new affiliate brand or such.

For quick snapshots, there are 3 default reports that are very useful too.

So, bottom line for me – yes, I think GA4 is an improvement over UA and I look forward to using it more now too.