Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google Analytics, released in October 2020. It is designed to provide a more advanced and comprehensive approach to tracking user behavior across devices and platforms, with a focus on privacy and data control. Universal Analytics (UA) is the previous version of Google Analytics and has been around since 2012. UA is focused on tracking website and app user behavior and provides in-depth analysis and reporting of user activity.

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Data Collection

GA4 uses an event-driven data model, which captures more granular data about user interactions, such as button clicks and video views. UA is pageview-based, which means it tracks user activity on each page of a website.

In GA4, user identification is based on a unique user ID that can be assigned to a user across multiple devices and platforms. UA uses a client ID to track user activity across different sessions and devices.

User Identification

Reporting

GA4 has a more streamlined reporting interface and includes new reports such as the Engagement report and the User Lifetime report. UA offers more advanced reporting features such as Custom Reports, Custom Variables, and Funnel Visualization.

Privacy

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GA4 has more advanced privacy features, such as the ability to automatically delete user data after a specified period of time and support for data controls that allow users to manage how their data is collected and used. UA does not have these features.

GA4 is designed to work seamlessly with Google Ads, allowing advertisers to track and measure the impact of their campaigns across multiple devices and platforms. UA also integrates with Google Ads, but GA4 offers more advanced tracking capabilities.

Integration with Google Ads

Conclusion

Overall, GA4 is a more advanced and privacy-focused version of Google Analytics, while UA is still a powerful tool for tracking website and app user behavior. However, as GA4 is still relatively new, many businesses may not have fully adopted it yet, and it may take some time for it to become the standard for web analytics.

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