GA4

GA4 is the name of the version of Google Analytics currently running on most websites. Google has changed the underlying design of Analytics a few times over the years, and GA4 is the generation that replaced the older, page-and-session-focused version several years ago. If someone mentions Google Analytics today, without further detail, they mean this one.

The bigger shift with GA4 is what it counts by default. Older versions of Analytics were built primarily around pageviews, how many times a page loaded. GA4 is built around events, a more flexible unit that can represent a pageview, a phone tap, a form submission or a scroll depth, all recorded the same way. That makes it a better fit for measuring actions that matter to a service business, but it also means the reports look different from what people remember from the older version.

GA4 sits underneath a lot of the other analytics terms in this glossary. Sessions, events and conversion tracking all run through it on the sites where I use Google’s tools rather than PostHog.

Why it matters to you

If your website has analytics at all, there is a good chance it is running GA4, whether anyone ever explicitly set it up that way or it came bundled with a template or a previous developer’s work. Knowing the name matters mainly so you can ask the right question when you talk to anyone about your numbers, and so you are not confused when a report or a screenshot refers to it by name.

The practical benefit for a small business is that GA4 is free, widely supported, and works well with Google Ads, feeding real conversion data back into your ad account so campaigns can be judged on actual leads rather than clicks.

How I set it up

I set up GA4 directly on the site’s code, loaded through Cloudflare rather than a separate tag manager script where that option is available, so the data keeps working even for visitors running ad blockers that specifically target Google’s own scripts. I configure the events that matter for that business by hand, phone taps, form submissions, booking clicks, since GA4 out of the box does not know what a phone tap on your specific site looks like.

I also make sure the account itself lives under the business’s own Google account, not a personal account belonging to a past developer or agency, so the data and the history stay with the business regardless of who builds the site next.

What it looks like in practice

Day to day, GA4 is the engine behind most of the numbers in a monthly report: sessions by source, event counts, and conversion totals. Most clients never log into it directly. I pull the numbers that matter and put them in a plain-language report instead.

When something does need investigating, a sudden traffic drop, a tracking gap after a site update, GA4’s own interface is where I go first to see the raw event and session data before drawing any conclusions.