GA4 101: Everything you need to know to get started with Google Analytics 4

13 Benefits of GA4

No gaps in the data & a cookie-less future

Google announced it was phasing out third-party cookies back in February 2020, but it has since announced that it won’t be building “alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products”. With this lack of third-party cookies, Google anticipates that data sparsity will become normal. 

Instead, Google will rely on machine learning to fill in any gaps in data. This is designed to be future-proof in a cookie-less world. GA4 is different to Universal Analytics in that it operates across platforms, using event-based data as its measurement. The goal is to reduce GA4’s reliance on cookies to record events, using machine learning to step in when user consent isn’t given for tracking. This should prevent data gaps in the future.

Identity methods are rebuilt

In Universal Analytics, you could only track anonymous users or logged in users. These were tracked in their own report suites and views and weren’t easily connecting users across different browsers, devices and platforms. Every time a user used a different platform or device, they’d be reported as an entirely new user.

Now, GA4 has rebuilt identity methods, there are several changes when Google uses multiple IDs. One is the new bridge identity, the other is Google Signals. 

What are Google Signals? This is Google’s identity graph of those logged into a Google account. If you opt into Google Signals and your users opt in with Google, you’ll be able to use their identity graph across devices using a pseudo-Google ID, improving your understanding of who your users actually are. This powers the entire set of standard reports in GA4, whereas in Universal Analytics, this was only available in a small set of reports.

Essentially, Google Signals allows you to follow a single user journey across their devices and platforms. 

User IDs are a unique, non-personally identifiable (meaning you can’t actually find out who they are) ID string used to identify and track a user. If you create your own using Google Tag Manager, you can import this into GA4 to enhance your cross-device reporting capabilities.

Device IDs are based on the user’s browser cookies (websites) or app-instance IDs (apps). Device IDs are used when custom IDs and Google Signals are not available (in that order of preference).

Audience capabilities

GA4 is more flexible than ever before, building on its already rich segmentation and audience capabilities to deliver brand new features. 

One of these is time-based sequences and time-based audiences. Previously, Universal Analytics didn’t do much to measure time, but now with GA4, time is meaningful. As an example, you could now see the time between the first visit and transaction, or add to cart and transaction. 

The ability to exclude audiences is greatly improved. This includes a more robust way to temporary exclude and permanently exclude, ideal for remarketing. 

As an example scenario, if someone purchased from you, you’d probably stop showing them ads. But if they came back and looked at more products, you’d want to start showing them again. For this, you can build a suppression list. This will temporarily exclude them for either a certain period of time or until they come back to the website and perform an action. They are then included as a paid marketing audience again.

Previously, only Adobe users could build event scoped audiences, while Google only allowed for session scoped or users scoped. Now, thanks to GA4’s event-driven data model, event scoped is now an additional option.

A fuller customer journey

By integrating all devices and combining web and mobile data into a single analytics property, GA4 is more focused on giving marketers a complete understanding of the customer journey in its entirety. 

This measures the shopping journey from end to end with its event-driven data model rather than just reporting individual metrics when it comes to devices, pages and segments. 

Privacy features

GA4 no longer uses or stores IP addresses. This is because they can be misused as personally identifiable data and compromise privacy. 

Instead, GA4 puts a big emphasis on privacy with more features and options to manage your data, helping advertisers to comply with GDPR regulations. One of these features is IP anonymisation, which is enabled by default. You also have the ability to delete an individual user from Exploration in the user explorer tab. 

You’ll also find consent mode. Ordinarily on Universal Analytics, if someone doesn’t give consent to be tracked, Google will lose all visibility and ability to track the user as it depends on having a client ID or alternative user identifier. GA4 introduces substantial updates to deal with this.

Consent Mode is set to power GA4 and aims to restore aggregate data using modelling rather than user IDs. 

Other privacy features include:

• NPAs (non-personalised ads) – you’ll be able to make an event an NPA, telling Google not to use it for their advertising products.
• Regional data settings – in Advanced Settings, you can find regional control for ads. This is useful if you’re not supposed to be doing ads based on GA data in a particular country or region.
• Data deletions requests – these have been greatly improved and far more targeted to be less destructive. To delete users directly from user explorer reports, head to Explorer > User Explorer > Find a User ID.
• Server-side GTM – this allows you to prevent IP addresses or anonymous identification techniques and to fully control, modify and manipulate all of the data.

BigQuery

One of the biggest benefits to GA is that direct integration with BigQuery is now completely free for GA4 users – even those with free accounts. Previously, this powerful platform was only possible for premium Universal Analytics users.

BigQuery, if you haven’t used it before, is an external Google Cloud platform where you can export all your raw Google Analytics data. It’s a serverless data warehouse that stores your GA data and allows you to build visualisations and get streaming tables.

This will become both your own marketing data warehouse and CDP custom data platform, giving you more power and potential over your analytics than ever before. Using real-time streams, you can have CDP activities like subscribing certain audiences to a particular email list or giving unique offer codes. It also allows you to do predictive analytics and build models to calculate things like who is most likely to convert or predictive LTVs (customer lifetime value). 

Previously, only those with the enterprise version of GA could get a record of everything a user did. Otherwise, it was impossible to scale at high volumes as a lot of data gets sampled using the alternatives, Google Data Studio or Tableau and you’d be limited to how many rows or columns of data you were allowed to export.

Setting up and linking BigQuery and GA4 is easy. Here’s how:

1. In BigQuery, create a new project.
2. In GA4, go to Admin > Properties > BigQuery Linking
3. Link to the BigQuery project you just created
4. Pick what streams to export (you can choose all)
5. Select your frequency as either Daily streams (free) and/or Streaming (paid*). 
6. Go to Google Cloud Platform > APIs and Services > search for BigQuery API > Enable
7. Now, make sure you’re in the project at the top, then click on Manage > Credentials > Create Credentials > Service Account 
8. Enter “firebase-measurement@system.gserviceaccount.com” into Service Account Name. Click Create and then Done.

*Note: the streaming frequency option continuously exports data within seconds of events happening. To get this option, you need to upgrade to a proper BigQuery project. BigQuery is free up to a storage limit. 

To learn more, you can check out GA4’s BigQuery demo.

Out-of-the-box event tracking 

In Universal Analytics, you could only track pageviews across your properties. While there were the capabilities to track some additional interactions, you’d need Google Tag Manager and an advanced knowledge of event tracking to make it possible. 

GA4 introduces Enhanced Measurement. This now incorporates the auto-tracking libraries you’d previously have had to manually set up in Google Tag Manager. With this, you can track much more than just pageviews, even without editing your website’s code. You can automatically track time-based actions like scrolling, outbound link clicks and interaction and engagement with videos, file downloads and much more. 

From there, you can much more easily customise your event data in line with your needs, like being able to temporarily or permanently exclude certain users who meet certain conditions or exhibit particular behaviours. You may still want to customise further in GTM, or even disable some tracking, but it’s much more automated in GA than before.

With Enhanced Measurement, you get much more meaningful answers to your questions, such as how long it takes your users to complete a survey, or how long they watch your embedded videos for.

Codeless event tracking

GA4 introduces the new functionality to create/modify events. This allows you to mark any events as a conversion. 

Previously with Universal Analytics, you could identify a conversion that was easily defined, like a thank you page. You also could only set 20 goals, without the ability to reuse them. 

GA4 lets you track certain events automatically, with no need to set up event tracking in Google Tag Manager. You’ll also be able to see if an event happens multiple times in a session as counts, rather than just recorded as one. 

You’ll also be able to create more complex conversions with the audience trigger feature. This will create and send an event when a user is added to your audience, which can then be used for conversions. 

Modify Events makes it much easier to fix simple mistakes like mistagged events. You could end up with different variations of what should be the same one like scroll_tracking, scroll tracking and scroll. With Universal Analytics, you couldn’t really fix it at its source, you’d have to use filters or update the tags.

User scoped dimensions

Custom dimensions in GA4 have gone through some changes. It has the options for both event-scoped and user-scoped, which are filled out by user properties. 

User properties are attributes you may want to attach to a particular user such as loyalty level, first joined date, number of purchases or lifetime value. This will carry forward and update over time. 

Event scoped custom dimensions are passed individually on each custom event. This is useful when you expect a user to complete multiple events in a single session.

Explorations

Previously called Analysis, GA4’s Exploration feature brings in advanced tools and techniques that help you dive much deeper into your users’ behaviours than the standard reports do. These include some of GA4’s most powerful and meaningful features: ad-hoc segments, funnels and pathing, which used to be paid options. 

Exploration is the freeform way to do your analysis and reporting, letting you build customised tools as and when you need to. It’s super flexible. For example, you can see the start and endpoints of a user’s journey, working both forwards and backwards to understand how they converted (or didn’t).

Here’s a breakdown of some of Explorations best tools:

Funnels were exclusively a paid feature before, now it’s available to everyone. And you can even visualise these as trended funnels, which will show you on a line chart how it’s performed over time. 

User Explorer acts similar to a session replay. You can see the client ids of all users with a particular behaviour, e.g: anyone who spent over a set amount. From there, you can click an individual user and see all their exact behaviour. 

Segment Overlap lets you find audience overlaps and mutually exclusive audiences. This is particularly useful for remarketing. Then you can start to create your own segments or review individual audiences based on this. 

User Lifetime is a brand new report that shows how users behave in their lifetime as a customer of your site. With this, you can see what source or campaign earned you the users with the highest lifetime value, see when your active users last purchased anything, and much more. 

The Cohort Report is similar to its original version in Universal Analytics but has been built upon to be much more flexible. 

New funnel reports

With the power of GA4, everyone can now build meaningful funnels.

Funnels haven’t been an option for those using the free version of Google Analytics, except for ones that are incredibly limited or inflexible. GA4 gives access to the analysis module and explorations to everyone – and it’s a more improved version.

With Exploration, funnels are freeform and segmentable, providing more flexibility than ever. 

You can create two different types of funnels: open and closed. Users can enter open funnels at any step along the funnel, while closed funnels have to start on the same first step. 

Other features include:

• You can change the funnel with one click to see data over time.
• You can turn on an elapsed time button to calculate the time between each of your funnel’s individual steps. 
• You can use meaningful padding including backwards padding which allows you to work backwards from an outcome to see what they did before.

Real-time reporting

Real-time reports have been majorly improved to include more data and dimensions. Now you can actually see events, audiences, some custom dimensions and other signals in real-time. 

Goals

Goals in Universal Analytics have always been very limited and rather inflexible. You can’t reuse them, they only count once per session, the data is permanent and you can’t set seasonal goals or goals for things that will change with time. 

Thankfully, conversion tracking has been rebuilt for GA4 – you can simply toggle conversion on or off for different events in the events report. You can also easily create advanced conversions with the Create Events feature. This allows you to create events from other events and combine conditions, audience triggers and attributes, resulting in far more unique events than previously possible.

GA4 has also increased the goal limit from 20 to 30, but you can also now archive goals to free up space.