If you’ve been using Google Analytics for any length of time, you’ll probably have noticed that things have changed rather dramatically over the last year or so. The familiar interface that we’ve been using for more than a decade has been replaced by something completely different, and quite frankly, I’m not convinced that everything has changed for the better.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was actually launched back in October 2020, but it wasn’t until July last year that Google finally stopped processing new data through the standard version of Universal Analytics, effectively forcing millions of website owners to switch to the new platform.
Now that we’ve had several months to get used to it, I thought it would be worth looking at what’s changed, why Google decided to replace Universal Analytics in the first place, and whether GA4 is actually any better than its predecessor.
Why Did Google Replace Universal Analytics?
According to Google, Universal Analytics was designed for an earlier generation of the internet, when most people accessed websites using desktop computers and tracking users through cookies was relatively straightforward.
Things have changed considerably since then. People now move between mobile phones, tablets, desktop computers and applications, making it increasingly difficult to understand their behaviour using traditional website analytics.
There’s also the growing issue of online privacy, with browsers restricting cookies and legislation such as GDPR placing greater emphasis on how businesses collect and process personal information.
GA4 is intended to address these problems by introducing a more flexible approach to measuring user behaviour, including the ability to track activity across websites and mobile applications.
In principle, that all sounds perfectly reasonable. However, I do wonder whether Google underestimated just how much people liked the old version.
Everything Is an Event
Probably the biggest technical difference between Universal Analytics and GA4 is the way they collect and organise information.
Universal Analytics was primarily built around sessions and different types of hits, including pageviews, events and ecommerce transactions.
GA4, on the other hand, uses an event-based data model, meaning almost everything somebody does on your website is recorded as an event.
Viewing a page generates a page_view event, clicking certain external links can generate a click event, and scrolling down a page can generate a scroll event.
This is actually quite a sensible approach, as it gives website owners considerably more flexibility in deciding which interactions they want to measure.
GA4 also includes something called Enhanced Measurement, which can automatically track certain activities without requiring additional tracking code for each individual action.
However, this flexibility comes at a cost, because some of the relatively straightforward reports and metrics we’ve become accustomed to in Universal Analytics now require a little more work to access.
Where Have All My Reports Gone?
This is probably my biggest frustration with GA4.
Universal Analytics had a relatively straightforward reporting structure, with sections covering audience behaviour, traffic acquisition, website content and conversions.
If I wanted to see which pages were attracting the most visitors from Google, for example, I could generally find that information within a few clicks.
With GA4, the reporting interface feels considerably less intuitive, particularly if you’re already familiar with Universal Analytics.
Some reports have been reorganised, others have disappeared, and certain information now requires you to create custom reports or use the Explore functionality.
To be fair, GA4 does offer some powerful analysis capabilities, including funnel exploration and the ability to examine individual user journeys in considerably more detail.
However, I can’t help feeling that Google has made some relatively simple tasks unnecessarily complicated.
For somebody who works with analytics regularly, that’s frustrating enough. For a small business owner who just wants to know how many people visited their website last month, I suspect it’s even worse.
What Happened to Bounce Rate?
Another change that initially caused some confusion was the apparent disappearance of bounce rate.
In Universal Analytics, bounce rate represented the percentage of sessions where somebody visited a page without triggering another interaction hit.
GA4 takes a different approach, placing greater emphasis on something called engagement rate.
An engaged session is generally one that lasts longer than ten seconds, includes a conversion event or involves at least two page or screen views.
This arguably provides a more useful indication of whether somebody has actually interacted with your website.
For example, imagine somebody visits a blog post, spends five minutes reading it and then leaves without visiting another page.
Universal Analytics might have recorded that as a bounce, despite the visitor potentially finding exactly what they were looking for.
GA4 would recognise that session as engaged, which makes considerably more sense.
Interestingly, Google has since reintroduced bounce rate into GA4, although it’s calculated differently from the old version. It’s now essentially the percentage of sessions that weren’t engaged.
Are the Numbers Supposed to Be Different?
One thing that’s caused a fair amount of confusion is that the figures reported by GA4 don’t necessarily match those previously shown in Universal Analytics.
You might find that your website suddenly appears to have fewer users, more engaged sessions or different conversion totals, even though nothing significant has changed in your marketing activity.
There are several reasons for this, including differences in how the two platforms calculate sessions, identify users and attribute conversions.
GA4 also uses different reporting identity options and can incorporate modelling in certain circumstances, which makes direct comparisons even more complicated.
The important thing to remember is that the two platforms aren’t measuring everything in exactly the same way.
Consequently, I’d be cautious about comparing your GA4 figures directly against historical Universal Analytics data and assuming any differences represent genuine changes in website performance.
Don’t Forget Your Historical Data
There’s one particularly important issue that website owners need to be aware of.
Although standard Universal Analytics stopped processing new data on 1st July 2023, Google has allowed users to continue accessing their historical reports temporarily.
However, that access is due to end on 1st July 2024, after which the old Universal Analytics properties and their data will no longer be accessible.
And unfortunately, you can’t simply transfer that historical information into GA4.
If you haven’t already done so, I’d strongly recommend exporting any historical data you might need, particularly if you regularly compare website performance over several years.
You can export individual reports into spreadsheets or use other methods, such as the Google Analytics API, to retrieve larger amounts of information.
It’s not a particularly exciting task, but discovering you’ve lost ten years of website statistics because you didn’t download them in time would be rather annoying.
Is GA4 Actually Better?
Despite my complaints, I don’t think GA4 is necessarily a bad product.
Its event-based approach is considerably more flexible, its integration with BigQuery opens up some interesting possibilities for more advanced analysis, and its ability to combine website and application data is a genuine improvement.
However, I do think Google has sacrificed some of the simplicity that made Universal Analytics so accessible.
For businesses that only need relatively basic website statistics, GA4 can feel unnecessarily complicated, while more advanced users may find themselves spending additional time recreating reports that were previously available by default.
Ultimately, GA4 is here to stay, so there’s little point wishing we could go back to Universal Analytics.
My advice would be to spend some time getting familiar with the new interface, make sure your important conversions are being tracked correctly and, perhaps most importantly, export your historical data before it’s too late.
And hopefully, Google will eventually make some of those reports a little easier to find.