When Was Google Analytics 4 Introduced?
Google Analytics 4, better known as GA4, was officially launched on October 14, 2020. This release marked a fundamental shift in how digital analytics works, moving away from the familiar session-based model of its predecessors. This article explains the full GA4 timeline, the core reasons for the change, and the key differences you need to understand when comparing it to the now-retired Universal Analytics.
More Than Just a Date: The Timeline That Matters
While October 2020 was the official launch, the transition to GA4 was a multi-year process. Understanding the key milestones helps put the change into context and clarifies why you can no longer access your old analytics data.
July 2019: The Precursor – App + Web Properties
Before GA4 had its official name, it existed in beta as "App + Web Properties." This version signaled Google’s new direction. Its primary goal was to create a unified measurement system for businesses that needed to track users across both their website and their mobile app. It introduced the event-based data model that would become the foundation of GA4, allowing analysts to see a complete user journey in one place, rather than in separate GA properties.
October 2020: The Official Launch of GA4
In October 2020, Google officially launched GA4, and it became the default option for all new analytics properties. This was the moment the countdown truly began for the old version of Google Analytics. While businesses could still create and use Universal Analytics (UA) properties for a time, Google made it clear that GA4 was the future and encouraged everyone to set up a new GA4 property alongside their existing UA one. This "dual tagging" approach allowed historical data collection in UA to continue while businesses began collecting new data in GA4 and familiarizing themselves with the new interface.
July 1, 2023: The Universal Analytics Sunset
Perhaps the most important date in this entire transition was July 1, 2023. On this day, standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new data. Any visit to your website after this date was no longer recorded in your old UA reports. The reporting dashboards went quiet, forcing a full migration over to GA4. This 'sunset' was the final push for any stragglers to switch, as their only source for current analytics was now GA4.
July 1, 2024: The Final Farewell to UA Data
The ultimate deadline is July 1, 2024. As of this date, all users - including Analytics 360 customers - will lose access to the Universal Analytics interface and the API. This means all of your historical UA data will be permanently deleted. This deadline highlights the importance of exporting and backing up any critical UA data you may need for historical trend analysis or year-over-year comparisons before it's gone for good.
Why Did Google Introduce GA4, Anyway?
The switch from Universal Analytics to GA4 wasn’t just a simple update, it was a complete rebuild from the ground up. This was driven by major shifts in user behavior, technology, and privacy regulations that made the old measurement model obsolete.
A Shift from Sessions to Events
Universal Analytics was centered around the concept of a "session" - a group of user interactions within a given time frame. Everything revolved around pageviews, bounce rates, and session durations. This model was perfect for a world where people primarily visited websites from desktop computers.
GA4 replaces this with a flexible, event-based model. In this new world, everything is an event: a page view is an event, a button click is an event, a form submission is an event, even scrolling down a page is an event (called scroll). This approach provides a much more detailed and user-centric view of what people are actually doing on your site or in your app, not just which pages they are visiting.
Built for a Cross-Platform World
Today’s customer journey is fragmented. A user might discover your brand on Instagram on their phone, visit your website on their laptop, and make a purchase through your mobile app. Universal Analytics struggled to stitch these interactions together into a single, cohesive narrative.
GA4 was designed to solve this. Because it measures interactions as events, it doesn't matter if those events happen on a website or a native app. They can all be streamed into the same data property, giving you a unified view of the entire customer lifecycle without needing complex workarounds.
Privacy-Focused by Design
Perhaps the biggest driver for GA4 was the changing privacy landscape. With regulations like GDPR and CCPA, and the upcoming deprecation of third-party cookies in browsers like Chrome, the old way of tracking users was no longer sustainable. Universal Analytics relied heavily on cookies.
GA4 was built for a cookieless future. It gives businesses more granular control over data collection and uses machine learning to fill in data gaps created by users who decline cookies. This technology, known as consent mode and behavioral modeling, allows GA4 to model conversions and user behavior even when complete data isn't available, providing intelligent estimates while respecting user privacy choices.
Key Differences Between Universal Analytics and GA4
For anyone used to Universal Analytics, logging into GA4 for the first time can feel disorienting. The interface is different, familiar reports are gone, and even core metrics have been replaced. Here are a few notable changes:
Data Model: As mentioned, UA was based on sessions and hits (like pageviews). GA4 is based on events and their associated parameters. This is the biggest conceptual hurdle to clear.
Reporting Structure: UA offered a large number of pre-built, standard reports. GA4 provides a handful of overview reports and expects users to build their own detailed analyses using the "Explore" section. This offers more flexibility but comes with a steeper learning curve.
Bounce Rate vs. Engagement Rate: UA's famous "Bounce Rate" metric is gone. It has been replaced by "Engagement Rate," a much more useful metric that measures the percentage of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or included at least two pageviews. It rewards interactions rather than simply penalizing single-page visits.
Cross-Device Tracking: UA struggled with this, but GA4 makes it a core feature. It uses multiple identity methods, including User ID, Google Signals, and device data, to better recognize the same user across different devices and platforms.
Goals vs. Conversions: In UA, you configured "Goals" to track important actions. In GA4, any event can be flipped into a "Conversion" with the simple click of a toggle. This makes conversion tracking much easier and more flexible.
Free BigQuery Integration: Previously a feature reserved for the paid Analytics 360 version, all GA4 properties can now link to Google BigQuery for free. This allows for advanced analysis on your raw event data, a massive benefit for data-savvy teams.
Navigating the New World of GA4 Reporting
The primary challenge for many marketers and business owners is the reporting interface. The lack of standard, out-of-the-box reports forces a shift in how you find insights. Instead of looking for a report, you now start with a question and use the Explore hub to answer it.
For example, instead of looking for the "Source/Medium" report, you might go to the Explore tab and build a basic free-form report where you add "Session Source / Medium" as a row and "Sessions" and "Conversions" as your values. While this requires more upfront work, it unlocks a new level of custom analysis that was previously impossible without a more powerful BI tool. Mastering the Explore tab is the key to getting the full value out of GA4.
Final Thoughts
The shift to Google Analytics 4, officially beginning its rollout in October 2020 and becoming mandatory in July 2023, was a necessary evolution in analytics. It moved the entire industry away from a rigid, session-based measurement model and toward a flexible, privacy-conscious one that better reflects how users interact with businesses today.
We know that even with a grasp of the history and key differences, creating reports and building dashboards in GA4's Explore tab can involve a steep learning curve and become a manual time-sink. That’s why we built Graphed. It connects directly to your GA4 account and lets you generate real-time reports and dashboards using simple, natural language. Instead of clicking through menus to build a report, you can just ask, "Show me US traffic and conversions from Google organic search last month," and get an instant visualization without ever leaving your dashboard.