5 Things You Were Too Afraid to Ask About GA4
Plus: Facebook announces that all video uploads will be reels
The old GA (Universal Analytics, or UA from here) was largely great when it worked. It was relatively user friendly, reports weren’t too tricky to create - don’t get me wrong, there were frustrations, but there was enough accumulated knowledge out there that most issues were only ever a Google away (heh).
And then, back in July 2023, GA4 effectively became mandatory as UA was sunset. Since then, if you’ve opened GA4 in the past few months and felt a deep sense of confusion, you’re not alone. In fact, I’d go as far as to say you’re in the majority.
This week, with the news in digital being largely the same as it has been for the last few weeks, I thought I’d look at something a little different - life post-Universal Analytics. Like it or not, we’re stuck with GA4, and I’m surprised in some interactions by how little a lot of marketers seem to know about it. So here’s 5 little things I often find myself explaining to people.
1. Yes, GA4 really is painful to use (but it’s not just you)
GA4 wasn’t built for us marketers - it was built for product managers and analysts. That means it’s structured around events (what users do) rather than traditional page-based metrics (what users see, or where they came from - the stuff we tend to care about). The trade-off is power and flexibility through reporting tools… at the cost of intuitiveness.
That’s why even finding simple things - like pageviews per page, or top referrers - now feels unnecessarily complicated. Don’t feel bad about needing to Google how to do basic stuff. Everyone is doing it - I’ve personally found ChatGPT (other AI platforms are available) an absolute game changer on this front.
2. The metrics have changed - and some of them aren’t backwards-compatible
“Bounce rate” technically still exists, but GA4 has redefined it as the inverse of “engaged sessions” - meaning it’s not the same thing you were looking at before. What was a great bounce rate before (based on single-page visits) might now actually be quite poor (because its based on page engagement rate), and you wouldn’t know it.
Ditto session counts, which are now based on event clusters (things happening that share the same session ID) rather than hits (up to 30 mins of activity). This means that page reloads or UTM changes don’t start new sessions any more, for example. But what you were calling a session early in 2023 isn’t what you’re calling a session now - but a lot of people don’t know that.
3. The reports are actually ok, but you probably need to customise them
The default GA4 reports are deliberately minimal - the idea being you build what you need from scratch. In reality, most people just want to see the same five things:
Where traffic came from
What pages people visited
How long they stayed
What they clicked
And whether anything converted
So if you haven’t already, it’s worth bookmarking a few Explorations or building a custom dashboard (or asking someone to help). Otherwise, you’ll spend half your life hunting through menus.
My own experience here is that the best way to approach reporting is to go in with a question you want answering, and to build something to answer that question. Failing that, just spent 45-60 minutes messing around with it and see what you can do.
4. For basic reporting, it might not be the best tool anymore
If your primary need is “what happened on the site this week,” GA4 can feel like overkill. In fact, a lot of teams are supplementing it with lighter tools or just using data exports.
You might also consider having a look at Google Looker Studio to build a mini dashboard with what you need - I’ve ironically at times found it more intuitive than GA4, which feels a far cry from the days when it was called Google Data Studio tying into UA.
5. So what should you actually care about?
If you’re not a performance specialist, I’d argue you really only need to check three things regularly:
Traffic sources (especially branded search, referrals, social, or which markets they were from)
Top content (which pages are working hardest for you)
Conversions/events (and whether they’re firing as expected)
Everything else is noise unless you have a specific question to answer. Don’t let GA4 guilt you into feeling like you need to be checking 40 different metrics or reports to be “doing it right.”
Facebook announces that all videos will be reels
Facebook has officially renamed all videos as “Reels”, collapsing every format into a single short-form vertical video experience. That means one algorithm, one measurement framework, and even less space for ‘traditional’ videos. For marketers, it’s time to think Reels-first - even for B2B. This isn’t just a UI tweak; it’s a format shift.
What else is going on?
In an embarrassing episode for Meta, it has had to warn users to avoid sharing personal or sensitive information in it’s AI app following a few mishaps. Probably good advice for us all to live by generally with AI tools, in fairness.
Speaking of Meta, it’s also going to start showing more ads in WhatsApp, as well as enabling in-app paid subscriptions.
Reddit is launching AI-driven tools to help smaller businesses launch ads on there. We talked about the recent rise of Reddit last week, of course.
A study has found that teenagers who report addictive use of screens at greater risk of suicidal behaviour.
Finally, Donald Trump is once again extending the timeline on the TikTok ban, which at this points feels like it will never happen.
That’s it! If you found this interesting, I would appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.
If you’re feeling particularly generous and enjoyed this edition, I won’t stop you from buying me a coffee. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week 🫶