Understanding Google Analytics and what’s new in GA4

Google Analytics is the most widely used tool when it comes to web analytics. Close to 30Mn websites use GA as their analytics tool. One of the major reasons for this is that it is Free and often comes bundled with certain CMS platforms and e-shops like Shopify.

That said, many users don’t understand certain Google Analytics concepts that they see in reports. I am working under the assumption that you have at least at some point in time in your career have had access to Google Analytics or worked on it in your career. If you have never worked on GA or don’t have access to a GA account, don’t worry — Google has a Demo account of their Merchandise Store which you can gain access to. The only thing you need is a Google account. Just follow the instructions here.

In this article, I hope to explain the basics of GA concepts and how they have evolved in GA4 so that it is beneficial to you when you next look at your GA reports.

Note: I will be referring to the old generation of Google Analytics as UA (Universal Analytics) and the latest version as GA4 (Google Analytics 4)

Google Analytics Properties & Account Structure

To understand GA Properties, we need to understand the GA account structure. The account structure has changed slightly between UA and GA4. The image below depicts the GA Organisation Structure.

A Google Property is the place where the website data is stored. The major difference between UA and GA4 is that instead of having Views within Properties, we have Data Streams. Views in UA show data for different view i.e. Website and Mobile App or any other subset of the data in Analytics for instance the data in particular geography. In GA4 Data Streams we have iOS app, Android App and Web. If you want to still see subset of data like UA views in GA4, there is a feature called Segmentation in GA4

Collection of Data — Change in Data Model

GA4 has a completely new data model as compared to UA. Universal Analytics was based on Users, Sessions and Hits whereas GA4 is based on Users and Events. All sessions and pageviews in GA4 are recorded as events. This may be a bit confusing so let us understand the definitions of these concepts —

User

A user is a visitor to a particular website. Users are categorized into New Users and Returning Users in GA

Session

A session begins when users visit a website and ends when

1. They exit the site by closing a browser OR
2. They are inactive for 30 minutes OR
3. At midnight.

A session by default is 30 minutes. When a user returns to a site after 30 minutes of inactivity, GA reports this as a new session. You can learn more about Sessions in GA with examples here.

Hit

Hit is any interaction by a User on the website that results in data being sent to Google Analytics. Examples of hits are page tracking hits, event tracking hits, ecommerce tracking hits, social interaction hits

Event

GA4 has moved away from session and hit-based data model to an event-based data model. This means that all website interactions sent to GA4 are events. Pageview is an event, social interaction is an event, purchase or an e-commerce transaction is also an event.

GA4 has made tracking easy for marketers by including built-in events in the tool i.e. automatically collected events and enhanced measurement. GA4 also has recommeded events and custom events which users can implement themselves if they’re not content with the automatically collected events.

Reporting — Dimensions and Metrics

Google Analytics has a free and a paid version (GA360) and the way we see reports in both are in terms of dimensions and metrics. Dimensions are the features of a website’s user and Metrics are the quantifyable values of that user’s actions. Eg.- If you want to see how much time a user from India spent on your website, your Dimension would be Country and your Metric would be Avg. Session Duration. You can see it in the image below of Google Analytics Data in UA Demographics Report.

Even though the dimensions and metrics are the more or less the same in UA and GA4, certain metrics are different and have changed due to the change in concept in the way GA4 captures data.

UA has pre-defined reports which gives a bird’s-eye view of the GA property’s data and an option to build custom reports using dimensions and metrics. GA4 has limited pre-defined reports but has provided users with “Analysis-hub” which is similar to Google’s Data Studio or Adobe’s Analytics Workspace. You can see the snapshot of GA4’s Analysis Hub in the image below.

The new Analysis Hub’s interface has a bit of a learning curve but it allows users to pick Dimensions, Metrics and Segments to build the report that they want. Since GA4 is still new and in development, I’m sure it will only get better and easier in the months to come.

Conclusion

GA4 is no doubt the next generation of Google Analytics which focuses on combining data of Web, Android and iOS in one reporting tool. Due to the changes in the data model, data in GA4 will not be comparable to data in UA. The 3 key takeaways from GA4 are the following —

1. New Data Model
2. Change in Event Tracking including Automatic Event Tracking
3. Change in Reporting Interface