Analytics

Google Analytics 4

Google's event-based analytics platform for measuring what people do on your site and app.

Official site

Overview

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's current analytics product, which fully replaced Universal Analytics on 1 July 2023. Everything in GA4 is an event — page views, clicks, scrolls, purchases — which makes it flexible across websites and apps, and lets it model conversions where cookies are missing.

GA4 is free, integrates natively with Google Ads and BigQuery, and is the default measurement layer for most sites. It is also genuinely harder to learn than the old Universal Analytics: the interface, the data model and the reporting all changed, and default reports feel thin until you configure events and Explorations.

What it does

GA4 collects events, attributes conversions across channels, and reports acquisition, engagement, monetisation and retention.

  • Event-based tracking that works consistently across web and mobile apps.
  • Conversion (key event) tracking with data-driven attribution modelling.
  • Free, unsampled export to BigQuery for raw-data analysis.
  • Explorations: a flexible free-form report builder (funnels, path, segments, cohorts).
  • Native linking to Google Ads for audience building and bid signals.

Where it fits in your stack

GA4 is the behaviour layer that sits downstream of Google Tag Manager (which fires the tags) and alongside Search Console (which owns pre-click search data). Its BigQuery export is the foundation for any serious custom analysis, and Looker Studio reads it directly for dashboards.

Strengths and limits

Strength: free, cross-platform, privacy-durable modelling, and free raw export to BigQuery — a paid feature in the old 360 product. Limit: a steeper learning curve, thresholding that hides low-volume data, and a reporting model that frustrates anyone expecting Universal Analytics. Data sampling still appears in complex Explorations on large properties.

How REO Rank uses it

We configure GA4 through Google Tag Manager with clean event naming, mark the key events that matter to the business, and build the reporting in Looker Studio rather than the GA4 UI. For CRO work we lean on Explorations and the BigQuery export to answer questions the default reports cannot.

Common questions

Google Analytics 4 — questions

Straight answers on how this fits your marketing and build.

No. Universal Analytics stopped processing data on 1 July 2023 and the properties were shut down in 2024. GA4 is the only current Google Analytics product.

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