GA4

GA4 - Google Analytics 4, the current generation of Google analytics. Replaced Universal Analytics (UA) in July 2023. The fundamental difference from UA: GA4 event-based - each user interaction with a site or application is recorded as an event with parameters, and not as a page view or session. This is more powerful for analytics, but requires different thinking and setup.

Key GA4 features that I use in my work: Funnel Exploration for visualizing the path to conversion, cohort analysis for assessing retention by channel, integration with Google Ads for importing conversions, BigQuery Export for working with raw data without sampling.

The main problem with GA4 is sampling in the free version with large amounts of data. As soon as the traffic exceeds a certain threshold or the request is too heavy, GA4 starts counting on a sample, and not on all the data. This breaks the accuracy of attribution. Solution: BigQuery Export + SQL queries to raw data, or GA4 360 (paid version, from $50,000/year - not for small businesses).

Another feature: GA4 by default is not very friendly with Russian realities - data from Yandex Direct and VK Ads comes through UTM tags, and not through native integration, like Google Ads. Therefore, for end-to-end analytics, GA4 only works well if you have UTM tags configured correctly on all channels.