Google Analytics 4 Basics Tutorial

Learn how the latest generation of Google Analytics can help you take your measurement strategies to the next level, and how to set up a Google Analytics 4 property for your business.

After following this learning path to learn the fundamentals of Google Analytics 4 Properties, you'll be able to:

Explain how Google Analytics 4 properties can meet your measurement needs
Explain key differences between Google Analytics 4 properties and Universal Analytics properties
Take it easy with the features and interface in the Google Analytics 4 property
Setting Up Google Analytics 4 Properties for Your Business

1. Learn about the new changes in Google Analytics

The next generation of Google Analytics is here to help you meet your measurement needs. Get started today with the latest Google Analytics and learn how you can best position your business for success.

In this unit you will learn about:

Benefits and Features of the Latest Google Analytics Experience
How to keep up with the latest features in a product that will improve over time

1.1 What's new in Google Analytics?

First, take a look at the Google Analytics 4 property, the newest experience in Google Analytics. It offers innovative features and greater flexibility, representing the future direction of Analytics (analysis). Whether you're new to Analytics or have been measuring with it for years, this infrastructure can provide valuable insights into your website and/or app!

Note : The Google Analytics 4 property was once called the "App+Web" property. The name was changed to reflect that this property type applies to all businesses, not just those with both apps and websites.

1.2 What is a Google Analytics property?

A property is where your company's online data is processed in Google Analytics.

In the past, there were only two properties: a Universal Analytics property to measure website activity, and a Google Analytics for Firebase property to measure mobile app activity. Now, Google Analytics 4 properties can collect both types of data. This property is available to all Analytics users: those with a website only, those with an app only, and those who have both a website and an app and want to consolidate all their data in one place.

Google Analytics account : A Google Analytics account can contain multiple properties and multiple property types, but a property can only belong to one Analytics account.

Universal Analytics Property : Also known as a UA Property, this term refers to the existing Website-only Analytics property type

Google Analytics 4 Property : Also known as a GA4 Property, this Analytics property type can process data from both a website and an app. Plus, it offers many new features for all Analytics users.

Note that there used to be another property type called Google Analytics for Firebase that was app-only, but it has now been upgraded to a GA4 property.

1.3 Benefits of Google Analytics 4 Properties

The next generation of Google Analytics scales with your business and measures performance across devices and platforms. This way, your measurement strategy can adapt to the changing digital landscape. Powered by machine learning, Analytics can also provide predictive results to help you improve your marketing efforts.

As a platform that is future-proof and puts customer privacy first, this experience was developed with your business needs in mind. Let's take a look at some of the benefits of the GA4 property type:

Scale with your business : It measures, unifies, and deduplicates all interactions between users and your business across devices and platforms, giving you a complete, relevant, and timely view of the customer journey.

Adapt to a changing environment : It provides accountable and durable performance measurement that helps achieve long-term business results while also meeting user expectations in terms of privacy protection.

Uncover intelligent business insights : It leverages Google's powerful machine learning technology to help discover data insights and automate the process, so you can effortlessly extract maximum value from your data.

Helps you achieve your marketing goals : It empowers you to more effectively act on data and analytical insights to achieve measurable marketing results.

1.4 Integrated Reporting

Users increasingly want to interact with businesses in the way that is most convenient for them. For example, research a product on your phone and then buy it on your computer. Gaining insight into these user journeys is critical for you to anticipate your customers' needs and deliver great experiences. That's why we've built the latest Analytics experience to handle all kinds of data streams for you.

Comprehensive Cross-Device Reporting : Users frequently switch devices or profiles when interacting with your website. The latest Analytics experience de-duplicates user data across data from different devices. This means that Analytics is able to measure the same user conversion journey across devices based on the best user identifier available. You can use Google's login data, add your own identifier for logged in users, or use both and seamlessly, Analytics will always choose the best available for each situation .

Unified website and app reporting : If you only have a website or only an app, the latest Analytics experience can bring value to your business. But if you have both a website and an app, it gives you insight into user journeys across platforms.

With this experience, for the first time, you can measure both app and website across all reports in Analytics.

Integrated reporting and analytics : Because of the variety of ways users interact with your business, you need flexible tools to gain insight into the vast data streams. The latest Google Analytics experience seamlessly and intelligently integrates all your data streams, revealing critical insights in reports tailored to your business.

You can even go beyond the predefined reports and use the Explore tool to analyze and explore your data in new and more flexible ways

1.5 How to get started with Google Analytics 4 Properties

No matter where you are in using Analytics, it's a good time to start using the latest property types now to prepare your business for the future of measurement. Creating and configuring a new property now has the following benefits:

Historical data can be accumulated early in new media sources, which makes future analysis and reporting more valuable and reveals more trends and insights over longer time horizons
Get immediate access to the latest Analytics innovations coming soon, so you can discover new insights from your data.

Tip : Start using GA4 properties now to take advantage of the latest features of this product, which will evolve over time. While a lot of functionality is already available, there are many new and exciting features coming to the latest Analytics experience in the future!

1.6 Summary of Key Points

The GA4 property type is the next generation of Google Analytics, able to scale with your business and measure performance across devices and platforms.
GA4 properties can handle data from both websites and apps.
The latest Analytics experience is now generally available, but we're constantly adding new features and innovations. \

2. What makes Google Analytics 4 properties unique

Whether you're new to Google Analytics or a veteran of data measurement, you need to understand what the newest Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property does and how it differs from existing Universal Analytics (UA) properties. Very important.

In this unit you will learn the following:

Differences between GA4 properties and UA properties
How GA4 Properties Collect and Process Data
How identity spaces work differently in UA properties vs. GA4 properties

2.1 Differences between Google Analytics 4 properties and Universal Analytics properties

You might be wondering why Google Analytics has introduced a new property type. When we started developing this new experience, Google Analytics was in its 13th year and the time was ripe for an infrastructure redesign. We want to make Google Analytics more user-friendly while preserving the key features and functionality you love from current UA properties.

So, what is the biggest difference between UA properties and GA4 properties?

Name	Universal Analytics Property	Google Analytics 4 Properties
measure	session-based data model	Event-based flexible data model
Report	Limited cross-device and cross-platform reporting capabilities	Comprehensive cross-device and cross-platform reporting capabilities
automation	limited automation capabilities	Leverage of machine learning techniques throughout improves and simplifies discovery of data insights

2.2 Some other key differences

Audience : An audience is a group of users that you define based on various user attributes that are important to your business, such as sports and travel enthusiasts, car buyers, or Users who have been exposed to or interacted with a product or service.

With GA4 properties, you can easily build new audiences and have more options when defining and segmenting audiences.

If your business creates IDs for logged-in users, GA4 properties allow you to use this data when building audiences. You can now define audiences based on the ID sent to Analytics to build audiences based on logged in users.

2.3 Advanced features available to all Analytics accounts

All users of the latest Google Analytics experience can enjoy a variety of powerful features. This includes:

Explore : With the Explore tool, you have more freedom in interpreting your data. You can use various analysis methods such as funnel exploration, path exploration, free-form exploration, etc. to discover data insights.
BigQuery Export : Export your Analytics data to BigQuery so you can store it securely in the cloud, combine it with data from other sources, and run queries across all datasets. You can also move the data to any other system where you want to use it.

2.4 How Google Analytics 4 Properties Collect and Process Data

The new way Analytics collects and stores data brings many benefits to the latest Google Analytics experience. Instead of using a session-based model (grouping user interactions within a given time frame), this approach uses an event-based model, where each user interaction is treated as an independent event.

Session-Based Model : In UA Properties, Analytics organizes data into sessions, which are the basis for all reporting. A session is a series of user interactions on your site that occur over a specified period of time.

During a session, Analytics collects and stores user interactions such as pageviews, events, e-commerce transactions as hits. A session can contain multiple hits, depending on how users interact with your site.

Event-based model : In GA4 properties, you can still see session data, but Analytics collects and stores user interactions with your website or app as events. Events provide insight into what's happening on your website or app, such as pageviews, button clicks, user actions, or system events.

According to the definition of the event, the system can collect and send specific information; this information can more completely reflect the actions taken by the user, or add more background to the event or user. This information may include the amount of the purchase, the title of the page the user visits, or the geographic location of the user.

2.5 Benefits of the event-based model

By moving to event-based collection, Analytics is more flexible, more scalable, and able to perform more custom calculations faster.

If you have a website and an app, it's important to measure a range of different user interactions to better understand how people interact with your business across these platforms. For example, you can measure:

Clicks and page views on your website
Installs and opens of your app
User interactions and conversions on any platform

An event-based data model can consistently measure these interactions across multiple devices and platforms, so you can extract richer insights from your data.

2.6 More information about events in Google Analytics 4 properties

In the newest Analytics property, several basic user interactions with your website or app are automatically collected as events. For example, the first time a user visits your site, the property logs this action as a "first visit" event.

You can also enable enhanced measurement, an option that automatically collects more events without having to update your website code. With enhanced measurement, you can measure many common website events such as page views, page scrolling, file downloads, and video views.

To learn more about Enhanced Measurement and which events are automatically collected, see this Help Center article.

2.7 Identity Space in Google Analytics

Analytics can use several different user identifiers when trying to understand a user's conversion journey, such as the ID you assign to users logging into your website, Google Signals, and Device IDs. These groups of identifiers are called identity spaces.

User-ID : If you create your own persistent IDs for signed-in users, you can use this data to accurately measure user journeys across devices. To enable the User-ID feature, you must consistently assign IDs to users and include these IDs in the data sent to Analytics.

Google Signals : Google Signals uses data from users who are signed in to Google. When Google Signals are enabled, Analytics will associate event data it collects from users of your website with the Google Accounts of signed-in users who have agreed to share this information.

Enabling Google Signals is easy. You don't have to modify your website or app, just turn on this feature and use it right away!

Device ID : Analytics can also use the Device ID as an identity space. On websites, the device ID comes from the user's browser. On apps, the device ID is derived from the app-instance ID. You don't need to do any further setup in Google Analytics to use Device ID.

2.8 Identity Space in the Universal Analytics Property vs. Identity Space in the Google Analytics 4 Property

Identity Spaces in UA Properties : In UA Properties, most reporting features rely heavily on device IDs, although a few reports and features can also use the Google Signals identity space. When the User-ID feature is enabled, its data is reported separately from other data, and the data is not integrated with other identity spaces. Because these identity spaces operate independently of each other, it can be difficult to measure user journeys across devices and exclude duplicate users across UA properties.

Identity Spaces in GA4 Media Resources : In GA4 Media Resources, data is processed using all available Identity Spaces. First, Analytics looks for the User-ID because this feature uses the data you collect. Next, Analytics tries Google Signals; finally, if neither matches, it relies on the device ID. This way, Analytics creates a user journey based on all the data associated with the same identity. Because these identity spaces are used in all reports, you can exclude duplicate users and gain a more consistent view of a user's relationship to your business.

what does that mean?

If you can only use one identity space, such as a device ID, the same person may appear as a different user each time they interact with your business on a different device. However, if you use multiple identity spaces, you have more reliable cross-device and cross-platform data, and reports reflect de-duplicated users. As a result, you'll gain more precise insights into your user journeys.

Every report in a GA4 property uses all available identity spaces [for the first time in Google Analytics], whereas in a UA property most reports can only use device IDs.

With the GA4 property, you can answer questions like:

How many total unique users do you have regardless of the platform they are using?
How many conversions occurred on your app and website in the last week? Which platform contributed most of them?

You can also gain greater insight into how your marketing campaigns are performing across different platforms. For example, you can see how many users started with your app and then visited your website to complete a purchase.

2.9 Summary of Key Points

With GA4 properties, you can easily build new audiences and have more options when defining and segmenting those audiences.
GA4 properties collect and store user interactions with your business as events rather than sessions. This makes Analytics more flexible, more scalable, and able to perform more custom calculations faster.
GA4 properties combine several different user identity spaces. This gives you more reliable cross-device and cross-platform data, and reports deduplicate users. As a result, you'll gain more precise insights into your user journeys.

2.10 Resources

To learn more about the capabilities of the GA4 property, click on the link below.

3. Understanding Google Analytics 4 Properties

Ready to start using the latest version of Google Analytics? Learn how to create your own Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property today.

In this unit you will learn the following:

Structure of a GA4 Property in Analytics
How to set up a GA4 property for your business
How to set up a GA4 property while maintaining an existing Universal Analytics (UA) property
How to verify that a GA4 property has been successfully provisioned

3.1 Understanding the Structure of the Analytics Property

You can dedicate a GA4 property to website data, exclusively to app data, or both app and website data. Regardless, it's important to understand how to structure your new Analytics property.

About Dataflows : Dataflows are a feature of GA4 properties that you can use to connect a single Analytics property to multiple places where users and businesses interact. For example, a company with both a website and an app needs to create separate data streams for each platform in order to combine reports and insights about them into one Analytics property.

As you set up your Analytics account, consider how it fits with your existing business structure and analyzes data in a way that makes the most sense for your business.

3.2 What to do if you already have a Google Analytics account

Are you already using Universal Analytics for your website? It doesn't matter! You can set up new GA4 properties and continue to use existing UA properties.

This way, you can enjoy all the features of the latest Analytics experience, while your existing properties remain intact and continue to collect data. We recommend that you start using GA4 properties immediately while maintaining your existing UA inventory. This will allow you to start taking advantage of the capabilities of the GA4 property and start collecting data within this property for future use.

Example: Xiaoqiu manages an online retail website and has been using Google Analytics for several years. He's excited about the new features in the GA4 property and wants to start exploring new experiences.

Xiaoqiu's existing Analytics account has amassed valuable data over the past few years, so he should keep his UA property on as usual. But he can still start exploring the new Analytics experience by creating a GA4 property.

Since he has a website, he needs to create a stream in the new GA4 property. The structure of his Analytics account should look like this:

An Analytics account
- A UA Media Resource
- One GA4 Media Resource
  - A website stream corresponding to his website

3.3 How to set up the Google Analytics 4 property

Regardless of how your account is configured, here are the steps to get started setting up your first GA4 property.

Step 1 - Open your Google Analytics account

Visit google.com/analytics to create a new Analytics account, or log into your existing account and go to the account settings section.

Step 2 - Create a GA4 Property

Enter your business information for your new property. New properties created in Analytics default to GA4 properties.

Step 3 - Create Dataflow

Select the platform for your stream - iOS, Android, or Website, and enter your app or website's information.

If you created a web feed, you'll see an option called "Enhanced Measurement." Leave this option enabled to automatically collect pageviews, scrolling, outbound link clicks, site searches, and other common user events. You can disable or re-enable enhanced measurement at any time.

Step 4 - Enable Data Collection

Website : Follow the steps in the guide below to make sure your website includes the appropriate code.

Gtag.js users: To manually deploy your Analytics code to your website using gtag.js, please refer to this developer guide .
Google Tag Manager users: To deploy your Analytics code to your website using Google Tag Manager, please refer to this Help Center guide .

Apps : Follow the steps outlined in this help center guide to create an app stream.

Next steps (optional)

Depending on the type of data your business uses, you may need to take additional steps to get the most out of your new property.

1. Add suggested events

If your website or app has functionality or behavior that corresponds to Google Analytics events, you can take advantage of the reporting of these events! While many important events are collected automatically, others require more work to measure. See the Help Center articles linked below for some of the events you can set up - depending on your business type:

Measuring these additional events allows you to capture more granular data and allow you to benefit from the latest Analytics features and integrations as they become available.

2. Link to Google Ads
If you use Google Ads, you can link your Ads account with the new property so that they can access each other's data. Learn the benefits and how to set this up in this Help Center article .

3.4 How to configure your Google Analytics 4 property while keeping your Universal Analytics property

If you're already using Universal Analytics, you may have added UA code to your website in a number of different ways. Recommendations for setting up GA4 properties vary depending on the configuration you choose.

If you use Google Tag Manager, gtag.js or analytics.js for UA

To find steps to configure a GA4 property while retaining a UA property, see this Help Center guide to choosing your tagging strategy for Universal Analytics.

If you use a non-Google tag management system for UA

If you are using a non-Google tag management system for your Universal Analytics property, please contact your tag management system vendor for guidance on how to set up a GA4 property while keeping your UA property.

3.5 Verify Google Analytics 4 Property Settings

Now that you have learned the steps of setting up GA4 properties in your account, it's time to check whether your configuration is successful. Please log in to your Google Analytics account, open your new GA4 property, and verify that data has started reporting.

This is done! With that in place, you're ready to start using the new Analytics features on your GA4 properties and take advantage of future innovations!

3.6 Summary of Key Points

In the GA4 property, you can set up dataflows for each platform where your users interact with your business, bringing all your data together into a single Analytics property.
GA4 properties are the future of Analytics - Analytics for everyone, whether you have a website, an app, or both.
If you're currently using a Universal Analytics property for your website, you can set up a GA4 property while keeping it to take full advantage of the new Analytics features as they roll out.
-Once the GA4 property is set up for your business, you need to verify the account setup: log in to your Google Analytics account, open your new GA4 property, and see if the system has started reporting data.

3.7 Resources

To learn more about how to create your own GA4 property now, click on the link below.

Switching to Google Analytics 4 | Help Center ↗
[GA4] Setting Up Analytics for a Website and/or App | Help Center ↗
Adding a Google Analytics 4 Property to a Site That Has Analytics Set Up | Help Center ↗
[ UA→GA4] Migration Reference | Help Center ↗
What's New in Google Analytics | Help Center ↗
Google Analytics Products | Official Blog ↗