Between UA and GA4, there are three significant distinctions.  

  • The way users are tracked is the first distinction. Session tracking is used in UA to track users. GA4 is a game where you play by triggering events. GA4 saves all events a user completes instead of generating a new session when they return to a site. This helps Google to deduplicate people more correctly, and it highlights what users really do on your site rather than just caring that they arrive. 
  • The reporting is the second point of distinction. There are a number of pre-built reports in UA, each of which may be customised. GA4 only has top-level reports built-in, thus the analysis tab is the place to go if you need more specialised analyses. This provides you with more control over the appearance of your reports and allows you to dig down the information that matters to you the most. 
  • The third distinction is the way they are set up. GA4 allows you to blend data from your applications and website, whereas UA employs a property and view structure. This is accomplished using a single property and data streams from Google Analytics. You can use the same tracking code across all properties (website, iOS app, and Android app) and combine the data to follow a user across all streams. This indicates that a new tracking code has been created. 

 

What are the benefits of upgrading to Google Analytics 4? 

 

  • The future of Google Analytics is GA4 – With Google Analytics 4, Google will be able to introduce new analytic techniques without having to write any more code. GA4 is now the default property type when establishing a new Google Analytics property and is fully functioning. Google will continue to add more common functionality as time goes by.[Text Wrapping Break] 
  • GA4 provides you great flexibility – Users may generate custom reports for the data they require in Google Analytics 4 and are encouraged to do so. The quantity of irrelevant, pre-made reports is greatly reduced as a result of this. Your dashboard will be less crowded as a result of this. You can locate the most critical data for your organization faster, allowing you to make better-informed decisions faster and enhancing the efficacy of your website and/or app.[Text Wrapping Break] 
  • More enhanced features are on the way – You’ll be able to move additional features from your UA property to your GA4 property as we go. Currently, GA4 attributes do not have filtering capabilities (at least not in the same manner as UA filters do), although this will change in the future.[Text Wrapping Break] 
  • GA4 is exclusively designed to face forward – GA4 will eventually become the industry standard. The new GA4 property, like all other Google Analytics properties, will only gather data from the moment it was created. Data from UA properties will not be imported. As a result, we recommend installing GA4 as soon as possible if you want to have more data. 

 

Google Analytics 4 is expected to be more powerful than Universal Analytics, providing more relevant data on why people are visiting your site and/or app. It enables you to aggregate data from different data sources into a single property and attributes actions to users more precisely across devices. 

 

While GA4 won’t provide you with all of this information right away, implementing it early will allow you to benefit from the increased experience and data sooner rather than later. We advise all site owners to adopt GA4 as soon as feasible on their sites and apps.