There are fundamental differences in how metrics are evaluated between Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4). And you are not comparing apples to apples anymore. Now, let's take a look at a few metrics that have been impacted.

Users

Primary user metric in UA is total users, whereas the primary user metric for GA4 is active users. This is the number of distinct users who visited your website or application, and they must have what's considered an engaged session; or there must be certain events or parameters collected by the tool relative to things like first visit or open or engagement of some sort.

The thing to remember here is that both tools use the same name: users. When you see users, it's not the same thing between the two tools, just remember that.

Views

Now let's look at page views and screen views. In UA, page views and screen views are tracked separately.

In GA4, they are combined and just called views. In addition, gallery views will be considered slide views rather than page views now. So this tool will impact the final views metric overall. So that's definitely a vast change in how we're defining page views, or views generally speaking.

Conversions

Moving on to conversions, in UA you define a goal indicating that a particular user action is to be considered a conversion. You account only one conversion per session for each goal that you define.

In contrast to this, GA4 only supports conversion events as you specify them. And GA4 counts every instance of the conversion event, even if the same conversion event is recorded multiple times during the same session. An example of this would be a user submitting a form twice during the same session. In this case, two conversion events will be counted. Really, how conversions are defined has changed. But once again, both tools are using the same terms. So try to keep this in mind.

Events

Last but not least, let's look at events. In UA, events are characterized by category, action, and label. This is something more on the back end as far as how events are defined.

In GA4, however, there's no concept of category, action, or label. Every hit is considered an event. It's a subtle difference, but it's a difference nonetheless, and it's going to impact your metric.

Now, there are other big differences in how metrics are defined between the tools. What I'm sharing with you today are the big ones to remember. We recognize that this is challenging to remember all of these, but we're here for you. We're here to help.

Amanda Holt is a data engineer for BLOX Digital.