Google's event-based analytics platform for measuring what people do on your site and app.
Official siteGoogle 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.
GA4 collects events, attributes conversions across channels, and reports acquisition, engagement, monetisation and retention.
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.
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.
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.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's current, free web-and-app analytics platform — the successor to Universal Analytics, which it fully replaced in 2023 — and it is how most sites measure traffic, behaviour and conversions. It matters because it is the default free source of truth for what happens after a visitor arrives: which channels bring traffic, what users do, where they convert or drop, and how marketing efforts translate into outcomes. Understanding GA4 is essential because it is both ubiquitous and fundamentally different in model from the Universal Analytics many people learned on.
GA4's biggest shift is its data model: everything is an event, rather than Universal Analytics' sessions-and-pageviews model. This makes it more flexible and better suited to tracking user journeys across web and app, and it uses engagement-based metrics (engaged sessions, engagement rate) instead of the old, easily-misread bounce rate. It is also built with privacy and a cookieless future in mind, leaning on modelling and consent-mode data. The trade-off is a steeper learning curve and a different, initially unfamiliar interface — many metrics and reports were renamed or reconceived, which is why teams migrating from UA had to relearn their analytics.
Getting value from GA4 starts with clean, reliable implementation — usually via Google Tag Manager — and defining the events and conversions that matter to your business, because the flexible event model means you configure what you measure. From there, GA4 answers the core questions: which channels and campaigns drive engaged, converting traffic; how users move through the funnel and where they drop; and how segments (source, device, geography) behave differently. Pairing GA4 (what happens on-site) with Search Console (how you perform in Search) gives a complete picture from search impression to on-site conversion.
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Google's free reporting on how your site performs in Google Search and how Google crawls and indexes it.
Google's free system for deploying and managing tracking tags without editing site code.
Google's free tool for turning marketing and analytics data into shareable, interactive dashboards.
Google's free tool for measuring page performance and Core Web Vitals in the lab and the field.
A behaviour-analytics tool that shows how visitors actually use a page through heatmaps and recordings.
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