Everyone in the digital marketing industry, who regularly keeps track of their website performance and traffic might have known about the recent update in Google Analytics. I.e; from 1st July 2023 onwards, the standard universal analytics will stop working and it is required to migrate to Google Analytics 4 before that. Most of you must have migrated and some will be waiting for the right time for migration. The App+Web Property introduced by Google in 2020 is recently rebadged and released as Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Here you can find more details on GA4 and GA3 differences.

The measurement model is the most important difference to consider. It is known that universal analytics is based on sessions and pageviews. I.e; a group of interactions taking place in a given timeframe that may include multiple events, transactions, and pageviews. But, the GA4 measurement model considers events and parameters. For example, in GA4, a page view is an event and the corresponding location, title, etc… are its parameters. Also, the free GA3 version had a monthly limit of 10m hits and this is removed in GA4. Instead, GA4 limits the total number of capturable events to 500.

Free connection to Bigquery is another advantage of GA4. This helps the digital marketing specialists to handle very large and complex data sets and to create complex segments. The other important differences are:

• Interface: Most of the reports that we used commonly in universal analytics is removed or replaced in GA4.
• In GA4, a measurement ID that starts with the character “G-” is used instead of the tracking ID stating with character “UA-” in GA3.
• In GA4, additional views can’t be created. Instead, it is possible to create data streams.
• In GA4, the IP anonymization is built-in and this can’t be disabled
• GA4 include advanced analysis reports such as user lifetime report, user exploration report, free form report, path exploration report, cohort exploration report, funnel exploration report, and segment overlap report that helps to analyze a customer journey.
• Issues related to spam hits are prevented in GA4.
• A new set of engagement metrics are included in GA4 for accurately tracking web and app user engagements.
• The debug view report will help to validate analytics configuration
• GA4 offers cross-device and cross-platform tracking. 
• Automatically collected events, enhancement measurement events, recommended events, and custom events are 4 categories of events that is captured in GA4.