Is the new GA4 whacking your brain? You are not alone.
GA4 has quite a few differences compared to UA. In broadview:
| Universal Analytics | Google Analytics 4 | |
| Measurement | Session based | Event Based |
| Session | End after 30 mins of inactivity or campaign reach midnight or after campaign source changes. | End after 30 mins of inactivity. Do not change after campaign source changes or midnight. Visitors must be "Engaged" to count as a “session”. |
| Bounce Rate | Users who leave your site without any interaction | Users who did not engage. Engage rules are rather lenient about this though. (E.g. lasting 10 seconds or longer = Engaged) |
| Users | Total number of users but not cross devices | Total number of unique users across devices (Hurray! Clearer numbers but lower user count) |
| Purchase | Same, it is event based. | Same, It is event based. |
| Goals/conversions | Track once per session | Can be triggered multiple times per session |
| Event | You need to create multiple events for similar event category. E.G. submitContactForm, submitSignupForm, etc. | You can have 1 event and it can be re-use to multiple events. Differentiate by parameters. E.g. form_submit with form_id parameter for various forms. |
Hope this clears up some questions about what are the differences. What GA4 shines for me is really cross-devices and the power of its reporting. We will dive deeper into their reporting capability in the next post.