When it was first announced, GA4 was mexico whatsapp numbers expected to solve many of the problems users found with UA. Google noted many benefits offered by the new generation of Analytics , including:
Collecting data from both website and apps with the promise of a more comprehensive view of the buyer journey
Increase privacy controls, including cookieless measurement in-line with the company’s discontinuation of the classic tracking system
And perhaps most ironically, predictive capabilities that offered “guidance without complex models”
Why is this ironic? Because the widespread response to GA4 from marketers of all stripes has been that, while in many ways better than its predecessor, GA4 is extremely complex to use – and actually alienates many novices completely.
How Does GA4 Differ from Universal Analytics?
GA4 is a major change from Universal Analytics; the entire framework that Google uses to track and measure websites and online activity has seen an overhaul. In fact, the company itself notes that the shift to GA4 demands a “rethink [of] your data collection”.
There are two main differences between the two models:
The first concerns reporting. Many of the out-of-the-box reports that were included with UA are either unavailable or require you to build them for yourself using the not-so-intuitive report builder.
The second is how GA4 measures user interactions. While UA measured sessions and page views, GA4 uses events and event parameters:
An event is now any action that takes place on your website. A simple example would be a click on your website.
An event parameter is an additional piece of information to add context to an event. The event parameter might be a specific video being clicked, allowing you to see exactly which bit of content was viewed.
