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.
A powerful share, I just given this onto a colleague who was doing somewhat evaluation on this. And he actually purchased me breakfast because I found it for him.. smile. So let me reword that: Thnx for the treat! But yeah Thnkx for spending the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love reading extra on this topic. If possible, as you become experience, would you thoughts updating your blog with extra details? It is extremely helpful for me. Big thumb up for this blog submit!
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