GA4

GA4, short for Google Analytics 4, is the current version of Google Analytics. It became the default for new properties and replaced the previous version, Universal Analytics, which stopped processing new data on 1 July 2023. GA4 measures user interactions across websites and apps and is the platform most sites now use to understand their traffic and conversions.

Its defining change is an event-based data model. Where Universal Analytics organised data around sessions and pageviews with separate categories, actions, and labels, GA4 treats nearly everything as an event with parameters. Page views, scrolls, clicks, downloads, and purchases are all events, which makes the model more flexible and consistent across web and app data within a single property.

GA4 also brings other notable shifts. It introduces engagement-based metrics such as engaged sessions and engagement rate, redefines bounce rate as the inverse of engagement rate, replaces goals with key events, and leans on data-driven attribution and machine-learning estimates to fill gaps left by privacy and consent limits. It offers a free export to BigQuery, which was a paid-only feature before, and it changes data retention controls for granular event data.

For anyone moving from the old system, the practical message is that GA4 is not a cosmetic update; reports, metric definitions, and the interface differ substantially, and historical Universal Analytics data did not carry over automatically. None of this connects to Google's ranking systems. GA4 tells you what visitors do once they reach your site, while search performance is measured separately in Google Search Console.

Related: Google Analytics, Conversion, Engagement Rate