Why Should I Switch to Google Analytics 4?

Still reminiscing about your old Universal Analytics dashboard? We get it. But with Google Analytics 4 now the standard, it’s time to move on from just setting it up to actually embracing what it can do for your business. This article will walk you through exactly why GA4 isn't just a mandatory update, but a significant upgrade that offers a deeper, more accurate understanding of how users interact with your brand.

Why Talk About Switching When Universal Analytics is Already Gone?

This is a fair question. Universal Analytics (UA) officially stopped processing new data for standard properties on July 1, 2023. At this point, you have no choice but to use GA4 for your current website and app analytics. However, many business owners and marketers set up GA4 because they had to, but continue to feel confused and a bit lost without their old-school UA reports.

If you’re still reluctant to fully adopt GA4 or don’t understand its core benefits, you’re missing out on the very reason Google rebuilt its entire analytics platform from the ground up. Understanding the "why" behind the switch is the first step to leveraging its powerful new features to make smarter marketing decisions. Sticking to a UA mindset while using GA4 is like driving a new electric car but only looking for gas stations - you’re using the new tool with an outdated framework.

Understanding the Biggest Shift: The Event-Based Data Model

The single biggest difference between UA and GA4 is how they measure user activity. To appreciate GA4's benefits, you first need to grasp this fundamental change in structure.

The Old Way: The Session-Based Model (Universal Analytics)

Universal Analytics was built around the concept of sessions and pageviews. A session was like a container for all the things a user did on your site within a certain timeframe. Within that session, UA tracked hits like pageviews, events (which you had to manually set up with categories, actions, and labels), and transactions.

Think of it like a store security guard who logs when someone enters (starts a session) and logs the aisles they visit (pageviews). It gives you a decent overview, but it misses a lot of the nuance of what people are actually doing in each aisle.

The New Way: The Event-Based Model

GA4 throws out the old session-based structure. Now, everything is an event. A pageview is an event. Scrolling down the page is an event. Clicking a button is an event. Submitting a form is an event. Even starting a session is an event (session_start).

Instead of a security guard, think of GA4 as a personal shopper who follows a customer around, noting every single interaction: picking up an item, reading the label, trying something on, and adding it to the cart. This model provides a far richer and more granular picture of the user journey.

Many important interactions are tracked automatically in GA4 as “enhanced measurement” events, including:

• Scrolls: When a user scrolls 90% of the way down a page.
• Outbound clicks: When a user clicks a link that takes them away from your site.
• Site search: What a user types into your website's search bar.
• Video engagement: When a user starts, progresses through, and completes an embedded YouTube video.
• File downloads: When a user clicks a link to download a file (PDF, TXT, etc.).

This event-driven approach is the foundation for almost every major benefit GA4 offers over its predecessor.

The Core Benefits of Embracing GA4

Once you see everything as an event, you can unlock new ways of analyzing user behavior that were difficult or impossible in Universal Analytics.

1. A Unified View of the Customer Journey (Web + App)

One of UA's biggest limitations was tracking users across an entire business presence. If you had a website and a mobile app, you needed a separate UA property for the site and a Google Analytics for Firebase property for the app. Stitching that data together to see how one user interacted with both required a data analyst and complex technical setups.

GA4 solves this with Data Streams. Within a single GA4 property, you can create a data stream for your website, another for your iOS app, and a third for your Android app. GA4 is designed to collect data from all these sources and unify it into a single set of reports. This provides a truly holistic view of your customer, showing how their journey might start on your app during their commute and finish on your website's desktop view at home.

2. Powerful, Flexible Custom Reporting

If you ever felt limited by the standard reports in Universal Analytics, you’ll appreciate GA4’s Explorations. This is where you can move beyond standard canned reports and start asking specific questions about your data.

The "Explore" section of GA4 offers several templates to build custom visualizations:

• Funnel exploration: Map out the steps a user takes to complete a goal (like a checkout process) and see exactly where they drop off. This was a feature of the paid GA 360, but it’s now free for everyone in GA4.
• Path exploration: See the most common paths users take after opening your app or landing on a specific page. This helps you uncover user journeys you might not have predicted.
• Segment overlap: Compare up to three different user segments to see how they overlap and differ. For example, you can see how many users are both mobile visitors and new visitors from the United States.
• User explorer: Anonymously analyze the specific event flow of individual users to troubleshoot issues or understand specific behavior patterns.

This reporting flexibility allows you to stop relying on predefined metrics and start getting genuine insights that are unique to your business objectives.

3. Smarter Insights with AI and Machine Learning

GA4 has machine learning built into its core, designed to help you find trends you might otherwise miss. It works proactively to identify opportunities and potential issues.

One of the most powerful examples is predictive metrics. Based on your event data, GA4 can model the future behavior of your users. You can create audiences based on users who are:

• Likely to purchase within the next 7 days.
• Likely to churn (stop using your app or site) within the next 7 days.
• Predicted to be top spenders in the future.

You can then use these audiences in your Google Ads campaigns to re-engage at-risk users or target high-potential customers more effectively. GA4 can also use anomaly detection to automatically alert you in the "Insights" panel when there's an unusual spike or dip in traffic, sales, or any other important metric, saving you from having to constantly monitor your data streams manually.

4. Future-Proof Analytics and Privacy Controls

The digital world is moving away from third-party cookies, and regulations like GDPR and CCPA have made data privacy a top priority. Universal Analytics was built for an older, less privacy-conscious internet.

GA4 was built for this new reality. It is designed to work with or without cookies, relying more on first-party data and using AI-powered data modeling to fill in the gaps when users don't provide consent for full tracking. This means you can still get valuable customer insights while respecting user privacy.

It also offers more granular privacy controls right out of the box:

• IP anonymization is turned on by default.
• You can set custom data retention periods, down to 2 months.
• It makes it easier to manage requests for data deletion.

By fully adopting GA4, you’re future-proofing your analytics practice and aligning it with modern data privacy standards.

What Happened to Bounce Rate and Other UA Metrics?

One of the biggest hurdles for marketers switching to GA4 is letting go of familiar metrics. But in most cases, the new metrics offer a much better way of looking at user behavior.

Goodbye Bounce Rate, Hello Engagement Rate

For years, a high bounce rate was seen as a major red flag. But was it always? A bounce in UA was defined as a session with only a single interaction hit (like one pageview). If a user landed on your blog, found the exact answer they needed in 30 seconds, and left satisfied, UA would call that a "bounce" - a supposedly negative outcome.

GA4 replaces this flawed metric with Engagement Rate. An "engaged session" is one that meets at least one of these criteria:

• Lasts longer than 10 seconds (you can adjust this timing).
• Has a conversion event.
• Has at least two pageviews.

Engagement Rate is simply the percentage of sessions that were engaged. This flips the focus from a negative (did they leave immediately?) to a positive (did they show even a minimal level of interest?). It’s a far more useful indicator of content quality and user satisfaction.

Final Thoughts

Switching to Google Analytics 4 isn't just about adapting to a new interface, it’s about embracing a more powerful and nuanced way of understanding user behavior. Its event-based model, cross-platform tracking, flexible reporting, and privacy-first design make it a tool built for the modern digital landscape.

Even with all these benefits, GA4’s learning curve can feel steep, especially in the Explore reporting section. If you find yourself spending more time trying to build reports than analyzing them, we can help. With Graphed, we connect directly to your GA4 account (along with your other marketing and sales tools). From there, you just ask for what you need in plain English - like "Compare traffic from Google vs. Facebook over the last month" - and we instantly build the dashboard for you. It's the best way to get all the rich insights from GA4 without the reporting headaches.