Everything about Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

TL;DR

• Google Analytics 4 is the current standard for measuring your website traffic. It’s free to use, even for small and medium-sized businesses.
• The major difference from the old version: GA4 measures events rather than individual visits. Every click, scroll, download, and video view is an event.
• As a result, you can see not only that someone is visiting, but also what they’re doing—across devices.
• The bounce rate has been replaced by the engagement rate. A session counts as engaged if it lasts ten seconds or longer, includes at least one key event, or involves at least two page views.
• Set your data retention period to 14 months. The standard is 2 months, and once data is gone, it’s gone for good.
• Your old Universal Analytics data will be permanently deleted in July 2024. From the day you install the code, you’ll start building a new archive.
• Are you having trouble with the setup, or are you unsure if your numbers are correct? Contact us, and we’ll take a look.

You invest a lot of time and money in your business. But do you actually know what visitors are doing on your website? Without reliable data, you’re just guessing. With Google Analytics 4, that’s no longer necessary. It’s important to understand how customers use your site, because that’s what your decisions about content, campaigns, and budget are based on.

Google Analytics 4 is the successor to Universal Analytics, the version many business owners still have in mind. That version stopped processing data on July 1, 2023, and as of July 2024, the historical data will also be deleted. If you’re using an old manual, the menus will no longer match. In this guide, you’ll learn what GA4 does, what to set up first, and which metrics really tell you something.

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 is a free analytics tool that tracks how visitors behave on your website or app. The system collects data on page views, button clicks, video views, downloads, and form submissions. This allows you to see which online campaigns are effective and which parts of your site need improvement.

The tool provides an overview of your digital performance and links data across different devices. This allows the system to recognize a visitor who first searches on their phone and later makes a purchase on a laptop. How well this works depends on your settings and the consent your visitors provide; we’ll come back to that later.

GA4 handles part of the work itself from day one. With improved tracking, it measures, among other things, clicks on external links, file_download, form_start, form_submit, 90% scroll depth, and view_search_results. The full list is available on Google. This is a gift that many people overlook: turn it on, and you’ll immediately know how many people download your brochure and start your form but don’t finish it.

When we perform website design for a client, we always set up GA4 right away. We configure key events such as contact requests and downloads. This provides us and the client with hard data from day one.

Why is Google Analytics 4 different from the old version?

The old version thought in terms of sessions and page views. GA4 thinks in terms of events: every action a visitor takes is an event that you can measure and assign a goal to. In GA4, a page view is simply one of those events.

That sounds technical, but the result is practical. In the past, you mainly looked at how long someone stayed on a page and how many pages they viewed. That produced a distorted picture, because a visitor who read a single page all the way through was considered a failure in the old metrics. Now the focus is on the actions that add value: a request, a phone click, a download, a purchase.

There are three things that stand out if you’re coming from the old version:

• Goals are now called “key events.” You mark an event as a key event, and that is your conversion.
• The bounce rate has been replaced by the engagement rate.
• The menus are different. “Behavior” and “Conversions, Goals” no longer exist. If you’re looking for those, you’re working with an outdated manual.

Discover what visitors really do with event tracking

The success of your business depends on understanding customer behavior. With event tracking, you can monitor which buttons people click and how far down they scroll on a long article. This allows you to identify where visitors get stuck on a page and adjust the text or images at that point.

This is valuable for your day-to-day online marketing. You’ll learn which ads actually result in completed contact forms, and which ones only generate clicks. That knowledge will save you money on your monthly advertising budget.

Important: Don’t measure everything. Twelve key events sounds thorough, but you can’t manage based on twelve things. Choose three to five events that are truly worth their weight in gold. A newsletter subscription and a request for a quote aren’t worth the same, so don’t treat them as equivalent conversions.

Also, make sure your tracking continues to work. During our periodic WordPress website maintenance, we check whether your tracking codes are still loading properly. A plugin update or a new theme can quietly break your tracking, and then a small error can cost you weeks’ worth of data.

How do you measure success using the engagement rate?

The engagement rate shows the percentage of sessions in which someone actively interacted with your content. A session counts as engaged if it lasts ten seconds or longer, contains at least one key event, or has at least two page or screen views. It is exactly the opposite of the old bounce rate.

Why this provides a more accurate picture: under the old setup, a visitor who viewed just one page was automatically considered a disappointment—even if they carefully read your entire blog or shared your article. That was illogical, and it has now been resolved.

What constitutes a good score varies greatly by site type and source. A blog and an ecommerce store are not comparable, and paid traffic behaves differently from organic traffic. Therefore, compare engagement by landing page and by source, and against your own historical data. That’s a fairer metric than an international average across all industries.

What’s the first thing you’ll set up?

Four things, and the first is the most important:

1. Set your data retention to 14 months. GA4 defaults to 2 months for event data, and 14 months is the longest option on a free property. Data that falls outside this period is automatically deleted monthly and is permanently lost. This is the most commonly overlooked setting in GA4, and it doesn’t apply retroactively, so change it today.

2. Enable enhanced tracking. It’s often already enabled, but double-check. It provides you with free insights into clicks, downloads, form submissions, and search behavior.

3. Choose your key events. Three to five. Likely: form submitted, phone number clicked, email address clicked, brochure downloaded. For an ecommerce store: purchase, added to cart, checkout initiated.

4. Exclude your own traffic. You and your colleagues visit your site more often than anyone else. Exclude your own IP address; otherwise, you’ll mainly be measuring yourself. For a site with a few hundred visitors per month, that skews your entire picture.

Then document what you’ve set up and when. A simple document listing your key events, your excluded IP addresses, and the date of each change will prevent you from looking at a strange spike a year from now without knowing where it came from.

Privacy and Cookies: What You Need to Know

Your visitors want control over their data, and privacy regulations are strict. Important to know: GA4 does not automatically make you GDPR-compliant, nor does it automatically collect data anonymously. That depends on how you set it up.

What does happen: visitors who reject your cookies aren’t tracked at all without the proper settings. To recapture a portion of that group, you need to have your consent mode set up correctly. Your cookie banner then communicates the visitor’s choice via four signals: ad_storage, analytics_storage, ad_user_data, and ad_personalization. Based on that, Google can estimate what the visitors who refused cookies did. This is called behavioral modeling.

There are, however, certain thresholds. For behavioral modeling, Google requires a minimum of 1,000 events per day involving denied consent over at least 7 days, plus a minimum of 1,000 daily users with consent on at least 7 of the past 28 days. For an SME website with a few hundred visitors per day, that’s not feasible. In that case, you’ll simply see less of what’s actually happening, and it’s more honest to mention that in your reporting than to pretend you’re measuring everything.

In short: consent mode is a technical requirement from Google that ensures Google knows what your visitor chose. Whether you ask for that choice correctly and whether your cookie banner complies is a separate matter. We set up the technical aspects; we make no statements regarding your legal situation.

Why You Should Set Up Google Analytics 4 Now

Because you’re building data starting today—not before. The longer you wait, the less historical data you’ll have to compare against. And since your old Universal Analytics data is no longer available, everyone is starting with a blank archive at this point.

A website without proper analytics is like driving with a blindfold on. You base your decisions on gut feeling rather than on numbers, and that’s a waste of your time and your budget. Well-set-up analytics are also the foundation for better discoverability: you learn which keywords bring in the most engaged visitors and which pages actually generate leads.

Link GA4 to Google Search Console and Google Ads. Analytics tells you what people are doing on your site, Search Console tells you what they searched for, and Ads tells you which ad generated the click. Taken separately, they only give you half the story.

Would you like to know how your analytics are performing, or would you like us to set them up for you? Check out our approach to Google Analytics 4 or read more about us. You’ll know upfront what we do and what it costs.