What is GA4?
Google Analytics 4, the event-based analytics platform that replaced Universal Analytics.
A worked example
A property is installed, data flows, and the reports fill up. Nobody can answer which channel produced revenue last month, because no key events were configured and ecommerce tracking was never completed. The tool is working exactly as installed.
Why it matters
GA4 moved analytics from a session-and-pageview model to an event model, which is genuinely more flexible and considerably less useful out of the box. Everything is an event, which means everything must be defined before the data means anything.
The gap between installed and configured is where most properties sit. Installing the tag takes minutes. Deciding which events represent real business outcomes, marking the right ones as key events, completing ecommerce tracking with accurate values, filtering internal traffic and excluding payment gateway referrals is the work that makes the data usable.
That last item catches out most Indian stores. Without a referral exclusion, a Razorpay or PayU redirect breaks the session, and the resulting purchase gets attributed to the payment gateway rather than to the campaign that earned it. Your best-performing channel disappears from reporting.
The nuance most people miss
GA4 and Google Ads will report different conversion numbers, and they are not supposed to match. They use different attribution models and different windows, so chasing agreement between them wastes time. Decide which one answers which question: Ads data for bidding decisions inside the platform, GA4 for cross-channel comparison and on-site behaviour. Reconcile both against backend orders rather than against each other.
Common mistakes
- Installing the tag and treating the property as configured
- Marking a dozen events as key events, which dilutes the signal until none of them means anything
- Leaving payment gateways out of referral exclusions, which misattributes your best revenue
- Expecting GA4 and Google Ads conversion counts to match