Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
What is Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?
Google Analytics 4 is Google’s free measurement tool for sites and apps, in which every interaction is stored as an event with parameters rather than as a page view inside a session. It replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped collecting data in July 2023. GA4 shows where visitors come from, what they do, and which of those actions you have marked as key events: an order, a form sent, a call started.
Example
An online shop reads one month in GA4. The events line up as a sequence:
- 8,000 visits;
- 2,100 product views;
- 640 add-to-cart events;
- 260 checkouts started;
- 96 orders at an average of €65, or €6,240 for the month.
By channel: free search brings 52 of the orders, paid ads 28, email 16. The largest fall sits between the basket and the checkout, 640 people down to 260. A change there costs less than a larger media budget, and it shows up in the same sequence the following month.
All of which exists only because somebody marked the order event as a key event. Without that, GA4 counts visits and stops there.
Why it matters for a business
The tool is free and exactly as useful as its configuration. Three things decide that. First, key events: if the form and the phone call are not marked, channels cannot be compared at all. Second, retention — on the free tier event-level data is kept for at most 14 months, so any “same month last year” comparison needs a regular export, to BigQuery for instance. Third, consent: what reaches the reports depends on what the visitor agreed to.
GA4 numbers rarely match the ad platforms or the order system to the unit, because each counts under different rules and different windows. Pick one source as the truth, usually the orders, and let analytics explain the road that led to them.
What to ask
- Which actions are marked as key events, and how was it verified that they record?
- Is GA4 linked to Google Ads and to Search Console?
- What retention period is set, and is there an export so the history outlives it?
- Is internal traffic excluded — your own office, the developers, the monitoring bots?
- Whose name is on the account, and who holds administrator access?
Our digital marketing reporting is built from these numbers rather than from screenshots of a dashboard.