UA taught its users how to think

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That said, depending on what your goal is, there are almost always more straightforward ways to get the answer out of GA4, rather than aiming to recreate UA reports. Such as…? RK: I think it is more useful to take this even broader and talk about the challenges users can have with GA4 in general. Let’s be honest, customers were used to Universal Analytics. In a lot of ways, – and GA4 requires you to think differently. We know that’s hard, but it’s also intentional. So we’re committed to helping our customers bridge that gulf – for example, with the newly launched Analytics Academy. In UA, you had to shoehorn your view of the world into some pretty limiting constructs – sessions, bounces, last click, etc. …In GA4, we’ve broken free of those constraints, but there’s a learning curve.

GA4 measures user engagement DB to Data your site or app differently – and more accurately. It focuses on the users and all the things those users do (measured by different events). Here’s an example: In UA, you’d typically look at Bounces and Time on Page to get a sense of “not valuable” traffic (or sessions or users or clicks depending on the situation). But that’s not really what it’s measuring. A Bounce is just an “unbound session” — a user came to your site, registered one page view, and took no subsequent navigation action. Is that a good measure of how engaged the user was? Given how the web worked in 2005 it was. Today, maybe…but more often, maybe not.



What if you have a single-page site? What if your important calls to action on a page don’t trigger navigation? Even if a user was actively scrolling, reading from one article to another, playing all your video content, submitting every lead gen form you wanted them to, out of the box, UA would tell you that they were all bounces and you’d be looking at a wall of manual tagging if you wanted a better answer. What’s the answer? RK: With GA4, we teased it apart and did the hard parts for the customer. Now we have Sessions and Engaged Sessions — and more importantly Engaged Users.