What is GA4?

Google Analytics 4 is a tool that helps you measure traffic and engagement across websites and
apps. It is Google’s latest web analytics tool that is set to replace Universal Analytics, or GA3, on 1
July 2023. With this latest web analytics tool, marketers will be able to thoroughly examine
crucial customer usage metrics rather than simply tracking their traffic. GA4 uses AI and machine
learning to provide more in-depth insights than Universal Analytics, into how users interact with
your website and app while tracking the customer journey across multiple platforms.

What Changed?

The key differences between GA4 and Universal Analytics are as follows:

● Privacy configuration: New privacy controls in GA4, such as cookieless measurement,

enable website owners to collect user data in a more ethical manner than from Universal
Analytics. The platform will also stop storing IP addresses. This comes in the wake of the
new privacy laws described in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
● Event-based tracking: It replaces session-based data tracking and enables you to track
conversions and user behaviour to get an idea of the customer journey.
● Predictive metrics: Predictive analytics enable you to forecast future user behaviour, such
as the purchase probability, churn probability and revenue prediction.
● New engagement metrics: Metrics such as engaged sessions, engagement rate and
engagement time enable easy tracking of a user’s journey through a website or an app.
● Multi-platform measurement: Using GA4, you can track data drawn from your website
and your iOS and Android apps.

Navigating GA4

GA4’s home page is customised based on your behaviour and displays information relevant to
you. You can leverage this page to track traffic, explore analytics and obtain insights on your
mobile apps and websites. Moreover, the home page becomes more personalised as you use
analytics more frequently.

Overview tab: Key metrics such as revenue are highlighted on this tab. By clicking on this tab,
you can view a trend line with a data point for each day in the past 7 days compared with data
points for the previous set of 7 days. You can also change the metric via a drop-down menu by
hovering over a specific metric. Personalising the overview card only affects your view, and
others will not be able to see the changes you make. Any changes made to the card’s metric or
date will be saved for future sessions.
Realtime tab: The Realtime card displays real-time activity using data from the Realtime report.
The card shows the number of users in the last 30 minutes (per minute) and up to 5 countries
where the activity is originating from.

Recently accessed: The Recently accessed section displays links to parts of your Analytics
account that you have accessed most recently. For instance, if you have recently viewed the
Admin page, the Home page provides a link to the Admin page along with the date of your last
visit.
Glossary Terms

Source: Google Support

1. Account: An account on Google Analytics is the primary location where all the data
related to your website is stored and can be accessed using your login credentials.
Typically, a single account is used to store data for a website. However, if you manage
multiple websites that are not interrelated, it is advisable to keep them in separate
accounts. For instance, if you manage your company’s website and a personal blog, keep
them in different accounts. Additionally, accounts and their assets can be shared with
multiple users.
2. Admin page: The Admin page in Google Analytics gives you access to the administrative
features offered by Google Analytics. At the bottom left of the page, hover over the gear
icon and click on Admin to open the page. Use these tools to create new properties,
change user permissions, add integrations, set up filters, import data, etc.
3. App stability overview: This shows the percentage of users who have a crash-free
experience on your app and the change (either rise or drop) in crash-free experiences
compared with the previous time range.
4. Audiences: Audiences can be created to divide users into segments in your reports and
to target any Google Ads accounts connected to your Analytics account. The structure of
an audience can be basic or intricate and can range from incorporating all shoppers with
zero product views to those who viewed a specific product and made a purchase within a
certain number of days. Audiences only include users who were created after the
audience was established, and the audience created does not apply retroactively.
5. Cardinality: This refers to the number of unique values assigned to a dimension. Some
dimensions have a fixed number of unique values. For example, the Device dimension
 can have up to 3 values, such as desktop, tablet and mobile. In this example, the
cardinality of the device is 3. Other dimensions, such as the Item ID, Page path or Page
location dimension, can have more possible unique values. Websites and apps in the
e-commerce space could have numerous items, and websites could have several unique
pages. These dimensions would be expected to have high cardinality.
6. Channel: This is a point of interaction with existing or prospective customers, e.g. ‘Email’,
‘Social’ and ‘Paid Search’.
7. Channel grouping: This refers to a specific set of channels, such as ‘Email’, ‘Social’,
‘Display’ and ‘Paid Search’. Channel groupings allow you to compare the user behaviour
for each channel in the grouping.
8. Collection: This is a set of reports. You can create your collections. Life cycle and User
are predefined collections that appear in the report navigation by default.
9. Consent checks: These cause tags to modify behaviour of Google tracking based on the
consent state. Tags created from Google and third-party templates have in-built consent
checks, and you can add custom checks. View and modify consent checks in a tag’s
consent settings.
10. Conversion: A conversion is a user action that is counted because it is considered
important, such as a purchase, game-level completion or website or app activity.
11. Conversion event: In Google Analytics, user interactions are measured using events.
When you want to measure a conversion, mark an event that measures a user action as a
conversion. Each time a user triggers the event, a conversion is recorded in Analytics and
displayed in your reports.
12. Data filters: A data filter lets you include or exclude incoming event data from being
processed by Google Analytics. Analytics evaluates data filters from the point of creation
forward. Data filters do not affect historical data.
13. Data Quality: The Data Quality icon provides information about the data you are viewing
in a report or exploration. You can learn more this data by selecting the Data Quality icon.
14. Data stream: This refers to the flow of data from your website or app to Google Analytics.
The three types of data stream are Web (for websites), iOS (for iOS apps) and Android (for
Android apps).
15. DebugView: DebugView is a tool that enables you to observe testing events being sent
to Google Analytics for debugging. Events sent to DebugView are isolated from other
reports and are not included in their respective data sets.
16. Detail report: A detail report shows data for one or two dimensions. It can include up to
two visualisations and a table.
17. Device ID: This is a browser-based or mobile-app-based identifier for a unique,
pseudonymous website or mobile app user. On a website, the device ID gets its value
from the client ID property of the _ga cookie. In an iOS or Firebase app, the device ID
gets its value from the app-instance ID, which identifies a unique installation of the app.
18. Dimension: A dimension is an attribute of your data. It describes your data and usually
includes text as opposed to numbers. An example of a dimension is an event name,
 which shows the name of an event that someone triggers on your website or application
(such as ‘click’).
19. Engagement: This refers to any user interaction with your site or app. For example, for a
content publisher, engagement may be scrolling slowly down their web page, indicating
the user is scrolling to read in contrast to scrolling to find out the article’s length. For an
e-commerce site, engagement may be viewing product details or spending a certain
amount of time on a page. For an online banking app, engagement may be a user
checking their account balance. For a college website, engagement may be watching an
informational video.
20. Event: An event allows you to measure a specific interaction or occurrence on your
website or app. For example, you can use an event to measure when someone loads a
page, clicks on a link or completes a purchase or to measure system behaviour, such as
when an app crashes or an impression is served.
21. Event parameter: Event parameters refer to extra details collected alongside events,
which may comprise automatically collected data such as the page title, page location
(i.e., page URL), session ID and other relevant information.
22. Property: Google Analytics 4 refers to the latest Google Analytics property type that
became the default Google Analytics experience after 14 October 2020. The properties of
Google Analytics 4 can be used to measure website traffic and app usage.
23. gtag.js: The Google tag (gtag.js) is a single tag that you can add to your website to use
various products and services offered by Google. Instead of managing multiple tags for
different Google product accounts, you can use the Google tag across your entire
website and connect the tag to multiple destinations.
24. Metric: A metric is a quantitative measurement, such as an average, a ratio and a
percentage. It is always a number, not text. You can apply mathematical operations to
metrics. An example of a metric is the Event count, which shows the total number of times
an event is triggered.
25. Overview report: This is a dashboard (comprising a set of cards) that summarises the
detailed reports on a topic. A topic can have only one overview report. For example,
when you click on Reports, the Demographics topic appears on the left. The
Demographics overview and Demographic details report are included in the topic. In this
case, the Demographics overview is the overview report, and Demographic details is a
detail report.
26. Permission: This includes the right to perform administrative and configuration tasks, to
create and share assets and to read and interact with report data. There are four roles a
person accessing the platform can occupy:
○ Administrator
○ Editor
○ Analyst
○ Viewer
Each role can be granted at the account or property level.
27. Report: Google Analytics collects data from your websites and apps to create reports that
provide insights into your business. You can use reports to monitor traffic, investigate data
and understand your users and their activity.
28. Report library: You can use the Library in Reports to add, customise and publish reports
and report collections.
 29. Segment: This is a subset of users, sessions or events. You can apply segments to
explorations to focus on specific data sets.
30. Segment overlap: This is an exploration technique that visualises the relationship
between multiple segments of users.
31. Session: A session is a group of user interactions with your website or app that take place
within a given time frame. An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a
conversion event or has at least two page views or screen views.
32. Setup Assistant: This refers to two separate tools that help you set up features in Google
Analytics. The GA4 Setup Assistant wizard in a Universal Analytics 4 property helps you
migrate from a Universal Analytics property to a Google Analytics 4 property.
33. Stream ID: This is a unique identifier for the data stream from which user activity
originates. You can add stream IDs to your events to send data to specific data streams.
34. Tag: This is a snippet of code that you add to your website to send data to a third party,
such as Google.
35. User-ID: The User-ID feature lets you associate your identifiers with individual users so
that you can connect their behaviour across different sessions and on various devices
and platforms.

GA Reports: Types

In GA4, reports refer to the pre-built summaries of data that are accessible through the navigation
menu on the left. These reports provide visually appealing summary cards that allow users to
quickly identify user trends or discrepancies. Unlike exploration, reports do not offer the same
level of customisation and flexibility, as they are pre-built and cannot be modified. However, they
are useful for providing a quick overview of the key performance indicators and metrics related to
website or app activity.
Realtime Report

GA4’s Realtime Report offers information on “who” is visiting your website and the actions they
take on the website, which includes the following:

● Which users were active over the past 30 minutes?

● Which channel is helping to acquire most users?
● Who are your users?
● With what content do users engage?
● What is the number of events based on the event name and events they cause?
● Which conversions do they complete according to the event name?
User Report (Previously: Audience Reports)

This provides information about the following:

● Demographics
● Location
● Technology used
● Behaviours

Acquisition Report

Acquisition Reports in Google Analytics will answer user-related queries while opening the
website. These queries include the following:
● What is the source of the acquired users?
● Which channels did they come through?
● What were the specific keywords or search queries used by the acquired users?
● What was the expense incurred for acquisition?
Engagement Report (Previously: Behaviour Report)

Engagement reports in Google Analytics will answer user-related queries after they open your
website. This includes aspects such as the following:
● Which pages are being accessed by users on your website?
● What is the load time for each page accessed by users?
● Which search queries are users making on the website?
● From which pages are users entering and exiting the site?

Monetisation Report (Previously: Conversion Report)

Monetisation Reports answer queries related to the goals defined by users, which include the
following:
● What is the percentage of website visitors that convert into achieving the goal?
● On average, how many days or visits does it take for a user to convert on a website?
● What are the channels that users utilise prior to conversion?
● What is the rate of transactions and total revenue generated?

Analysis/Explorations: Types

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers a critical feature called Exploration, which encompasses a range
of advanced analysis techniques that enable you to delve into your customers’ behaviour and
gain a deep understanding of their actions. This feature goes beyond traditional reports, allowing
you to discover in-depth insights into your customers and create custom reports to meet their
needs. Exploration allows you to navigate through data and identify valuable insights.

● User lifetime: This allows you to examine users’ behaviour over their entire lifetime as
customers of your website and app. This technique also helps in tracking previous
campaigns that attracted users with the highest lifetime revenue, evaluating the purchase
probability of your current campaigns and analysing unique user behaviour.
● Cohort exploration: This involves examining a group of users over time who share similar
attributes over time. For instance, you can group users based on their acquisition date
and compare them using various metrics.

● Funnel exploration: This helps you identify the steps users take while interacting with
your website or app to complete an event. By breaking down the customer journey into
specific stages, you can identify new buyers and returning customers, optimise the user
experience and improve customer retention.
● Path exploration: This creates a visual representation in the form of a graph of the steps
users take when interacting with your website or app. This helps understand how their
behaviour triggers events and allows you to identify the previous and following actions of
users when completing an event.

● Segment overlap: This enables the comparison of three user segments to determine their
correlation. This technique is useful in identifying overlapping audience profiles and
creating new segments.
● Free form: This provides the ability to personalise a report according to specific business
needs. This technique offers flexibility by allowing combinations of segments, dimensions,
custom metrics and data visualisation graphs to analyse and interpret business data.

● User exploration: This enables you to gain insights into the behaviour of individual
customers as they interact with your website or app. Using this technique, you can
analyse the behaviour of different user segments and understand how they engage with
your website or app.