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Google officially shut down Universal Analytics as planned. The standard version stopped working on July 1, 2023, followed by Universal Analytics 360, which had a one-year processing extension and stopped on July 1, 2024. As of 2025, all users must transition to Google Analytics 4, as theprevious version is no longer supported. Universal Analytics, the previous version, had different features and reporting methods; therefore, it's essential to understand these differences when transitioning to the new platform.
In this article, we analyze the key advantages of Google Analytics 4, including its ability to generate custom reports, and why delaying the transition has risked losing historical data once the UA interface became read‑only on July 1, 2024. Unlike UA, GA4 offers enhanced event-based tracking and new reporting capabilities. Additionally, make sure the data collected in the previous version is preserved or properly migrated to GA4 for continued analysis.
Over the past decade, people have begun to live online and regularly access the internet from multiple devices. Having previously analyzed cookies, devices, browsers, visits from contextual advertising, search, and targeted networks, it’s now extremely important to analyze a specific user’s flow across devices, platforms, and products.
User privacy and privacy practices have become central to these changes, with modern analytics tools like GA4 incorporating features to address evolving data protection regulations and user concerns.
Today, businesses that know their clients win. The latest Google Analytics update reflects the fact that we now understand a user not as a set of cookies but as a specific person. We understand that they can act on different platforms and that an individual’s profiles across platforms need to be connected.
According to estimates of Western analytical giants, the following situation exists in the US and Western European markets, affecting the quality of analytics data:
Cookies are slowly becoming a thing of the past. Their lifetime is limited, and the ability to work with third-party cookies is restricted. They are no longer a reliable source of data about people or reliable support for building an analytical platform. Consequently, Google Analytics 4 is moving away from cookies. Third-party cookies are being deprecated in Chrome (2025), but GA4 still relies on first-party cookies for basic session stitching, while emphasizing user- and event-level modeling. Google Analytics 4 automatically hides user IP addresses to support privacy, and there’s no option to switch this off. This approach is designed to comply with today’s data protection regulations.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google’s latest analytics platform, built to help businesses better understand how people interact with their websites and apps. Unlike Universal Analytics, which focuses mainly on sessions, GA4 uses an event-based model that provides more flexibility in how you collect and interpret data about user behavior.
With Google Analytics 4, digital marketers can create custom reports tailored to their unique business objectives, track user interactions in real time, and build audiences based on specific actions or attributes. The platform’s advanced analytics capabilities enable businesses to analyze the entire customer journey, from the first website visit to app usage and eventual conversion.
In 2021, Google Analytics experienced a big update that changed many things:
GA4 now offers standard reports for quick insights and also allows you to create a custom report tailored to your specific needs.
Google Analytics and many other analytics systems employ a session-based/cookie-based architecture, featuring a root identifier for each set of cookies. In Google Analytics, this identifier is referred to as the Client ID. There are also sessions — user visits — on which all reports are based. At one time, this was a prerequisite for switching to an e-commerce model of system operation.
However, over time, numerous errors and problems have emerged related to the session model. For instance, building a normal cohort analysis, counting conversions, and evaluating advertising campaigns in terms of their effectiveness and impact on business proved to be a challenge.
Google Analytics 4 is an event-based and user-based system. Everything in Google Analytics 4 is built around the user (not the session), and any interaction with the website is considered an event. Each event is identified by an event name, a key component in GA4's event model that enables flexible categorization and analysis of user interactions. Events are logged, and the user’s path through the website is built from them.
In fact, working with these events, as with micro conversions, we can build funnel-based attribution that many companies need to evaluate the effectiveness of internet marketing investments at their earliest stage. Additionally, GA4 supports up to 30 key events per property (vs. 20 goals per view in Universal Analytics).
In GA4, conversions are tracked through what's called a conversion event, a key part of how the platform attributes value to different traffic sources. GA4 also gives you more flexibility with custom event tracking, allowing up to 25 parameters per event. That means you can capture more detailed information about what users are doing.
At first glance, little has changed in terms of data pipelines. In Universal Analytics, you could configure the website and mobile app tracking via Firebase. But what did we really have? There was a data pipeline from the website, as well as an independent data pipeline from mobile applications. To connect them, you had to do a reasonable amount of tinkering with cookies.
Additionally, there was a separate data pipeline from the CRM system that included the User ID. Importantly, Universal Analytics required you to set up separate properties for each data source, such as the website and each mobile app. If, for some reason, we couldn’t allocate the User ID, we used Google Signals instead.
Now, Google Analytics 4 can utilize data as a single pipeline: website, application, and user ID. GA4 allows you to combine data from both website and mobile app platforms within a single property, providing unified reporting and tracking. You can create sub‑properties or roll‑up properties if you need filtered or combined views. Previously, we had three independent data pipelines; now, we have unified reporting across websites, mobile applications, and User IDs.
When setting up data streams in GA4, you can track data from the web, such as your website, and from mobile apps, including the Android app, all within the same property.
Previously, data was obtained based on cookies or on the information you could independently collect about the user, such as the User ID from your CRM, ERP, CMS, or PPM systems.
Now every user can simultaneously be assigned a User ID, Google Signals, and, most importantly, Device ID. If you cannot use the User ID, you can replace it with the Device ID. GA4 selects the best available identifier in the following order: User ID > Google Signals > Device ID; you don’t manually assign all three. All statistics are built around the user or the unified device identifier, not cookies. Previously, a person who visited a website from two different browsers but from the same device had two different Client IDs.
This meant it was not possible to link statistics for these IDs if there was no authorization on the website and no User ID was provided. According to Google Analytics, these were two different visitors. Now, thanks to Device ID, these visits can be consolidated into a single profile within the Google Analytics 4 platform. GA4 also tracks user events across different devices and platforms, helping you connect the dots between user interactions and get a clearer picture of the whole customer journey.
When building user profiles, the data from these interactions and events plays a key role in understanding behavior and generating accurate insights. Additionally, the DebugView tool in GA4 enables real-time debugging of events and user interactions, making troubleshooting more efficient.
Previously, after installing Google Analytics on the website, we received empty fields. We only received traffic that wasn’t always collected correctly because the company, for example, had several domains, and cross-domain tracking wasn’t configured. This problem was especially relevant for small and medium-sized businesses. Companies received useless statistics, according to which little could be understood or predicted about the effectiveness of advertising investments.
Once GA4 is set up, it automatically starts tracking common events like page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, file downloads, purchases, and more without any extra configuration.
This built-in tracking captures important user actions, like purchases, so you can better understand how people interact with your site or app. This allows people who aren’t well-versed in Google Analytics and don’t want to waste their time to get the event preset out of the box. GA4 also provides advanced user engagement metrics by automatically tracking interaction events, for example, engagement rate and user engagement time replace bounce rate.
Universal Analytics is famous for complex reports and conflicting data. It presents users with a million tables, numbers, and formats. Moreover, when setting up reports, you may encounter incompatible parameters and only discover them when you save the report. Reports aren’t user-friendly, and the system’s capabilities are limited by its architecture, which is based on cookies and Client ID.
In Google Analytics 4, you can create reports, data slices, and audiences and compare them on the go. It’s much faster and more convenient. Now you have a single dataset containing information about users and the actions they take on the website or in the application, and you can structure this data in a way that is convenient for you. GA4 allows you to explore your data in detail and customize detailed reports in all the ways you need, offering flexibility and granular insights.
In fact, Google Analytics 4 is a set of well-customized dashboards. It ships with reusable Explorations and Overview cards that can be customized into dashboards. Moreover, GA4 offers superior audience segmentation capabilities compared to Universal Analytics, allowing businesses to target their users more effectively and enhance data quality for more accurate insights. GA4’s engagement rate offers a more nuanced understanding of user interactions than the bounce rate (Bounce rate still exists in Reports > Engagement but is now the inverse of engagement rate).
Universal Analytics is hard to integrate. The Measurement Protocol allows you to transfer data to Google Analytics, but it’s not always stable and transparent in tracking and testing. As a result, we have unstable custom integrations and far from transparent rules of the game, for example, with sampling or the amount of data being uploaded. We receive data in large numbers in various poorly connected interfaces.
Google Analytics 4 is a single data system. Now, we can view all data on user actions across our websites in a single interface. This data can be easily integrated with Google’s advertising services and with BigQuery. Notably, GA4 integrates with Google BigQuery at no extra cost for data analysis, making it more accessible for businesses to leverage advanced analytics. However, compared to other tools like Mixpanel or BigQuery itself, GA4 offers less flexibility for advanced funnel creation, data filtering, and retroactive data manipulation, as different tools provide more customization options for these tasks.
Google Analytics 4 introduces a modern, streamlined interface designed to reduce clutter and improve usability. While it may feel unfamiliar at first, especially for long-time Universal Analytics users, the new layout focuses on flexibility, faster navigation, and easier access to key insights.
Instead of overwhelming users with dozens of predefined reports, GA4 offers customizable dashboards and tools, such as Explorations, which allow you to build tailored visualizations and reports.
As of January 7, 2022, a data-driven cross-channel attribution model is now available to all Google Analytics 4 users. It became the default attribution model across GA4 reports in September 2023. However, GA4 currently lacks scheduled email delivery; users must rely on Looker Studio or the GA4 API instead. Additionally, reporting workflows have changed, as GA4 replaces the traditional view filters from Universal Analytics with data filters applied directly to data streams, which may necessitate alternative solutions for more granular filtering.
What do we want from an attribution model? For it to be accurate and understandable. But the standard attribution models available in Universal Analytics meet only one of these requirements.
For example, the most popular last-click attribution model (Last-Click, Last Non-Direct Click) is quite understandable — all value is given to the last campaign. However, it has an obvious drawback — it overlooks the contributions of all campaigns except the last.
Many people use associated conversions, especially to evaluate display campaigns. This model gives value to the conversions of every campaign the user has interacted with. However, such an assessment is extremely inaccurate, as it considers only the existence of a campaign in the chain and overlooks its degree of influence.
Probabilistic attribution models such as Data-Driven produce more accurate results. They assess how much a specific campaign has increased the likelihood of conversion, and accordingly, determine its value. A key benefit of data-driven attribution in GA4 is that it offers more accurate credit distribution for conversions, potentially improving ROI by better reflecting the true impact of each channel.
Previously, only Google Analytics 360 users had access to data-based attribution. And to use it, they needed to fulfill additional requirements.
Unlike previous versions, Google Analytics 4 allows you to change the predefined attribution model for all reports. Now you can apply not only rule-based cross-channel models for free but also an alternative data-based model. Additionally, funnel analysis in GA4 is no longer limited by the restrictions present in Universal Analytics, allowing for more flexible and extensive tracking across multiple sessions and historical data.
Let’s summarize:
One of the standout benefits of Google Analytics 4 is its advanced audience segmentation and targeting capabilities. Unlike Universal Analytics, GA4 empowers businesses to create highly customized audiences based on a wide range of user behaviors, demographics, and interests. This means you can segment users not just by basic metrics, but also by specific events captured across both your website and mobile apps.
GA4 provides deeper insights into user behavior, offering engagement metrics like time spent on site, pages per session, and more, allowing for more precise audience definitions. With the ability to create audiences based on these granular behaviors, businesses can deliver personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with each segment. The integration with Google Ads makes it easy to activate these audiences for targeted advertising, ensuring your marketing efforts reach the right users at the right time.
Additionally, GA4 introduces audience triggers, enabling businesses to automatically create custom events when users meet certain criteria, such as completing a series of actions or reaching a milestone. This feature, combined with BigQuery integration, enables sophisticated analysis of large datasets, allowing businesses to uncover new insights and optimize their strategies.
Google Analytics 4 incorporates machine learning to provide you with more than just basic reports. It can pick up on trends, spot anything out of the ordinary, and even predict what users might do next, like who’s at risk of dropping off or who’s likely to buy, based on their past activity.
These predictive metrics enable businesses to take a more proactive approach, engaging users earlier and adjusting campaigns to drive more conversions. To populate, predictive metrics require at least 1,000 purchase or churn events within a 28-day period.
If your website receives high traffic and transaction volumes, GA4 can generate predictive audiences such as:
You can directly use these audiences in your Google Ads campaigns to create highly targeted, data-backed ad strategies. This adds a strategic layer to your analytics setup that wasn’t available in Universal Analytics.
To be effective in the current reality, businesses need to:
This means it’s extremely important to collect all information about your users and use it in marketing and automation analysis.
Moving to Google Analytics 4 isn’t just a simple switch; it requires some planning and technical setup to ensure your data continues to work for you. Here are the key actions businesses should take to ensure a smooth and effective transition.
OWOX BI is an authorized Google Cloud Platform Partner, and we guarantee our customers the same high standards that Google provides. OWOX has experience transferring business data to Google Analytics 4 by providing clients with a smooth migration process, from creating a unique metrics system to holding workshops for business users on Google Analytics functionality, as the new version differs significantly from the previous one.
Unlike Universal Analytics, which required creating separate properties for each website or app, GA4 enables you to unify data streams from multiple platforms within a single property. GA4 also includes features for user consent management, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR, and allowing businesses to handle user data responsibly.
Step 1. OWOX BI analysts identify, develop, and deploy a metrics system, as well as configure parallel tracking. This step may include the following:
After Google Analytics 4 is configured and you start collecting historical data, you need to address the issue of updating old reports and connecting data from Google Analytics 4 to them. Migrating your analytics data from Universal Analytics to GA4 is crucial to ensure continuity and to take advantage of the new features and integrations available in GA4.
Step 2. Transfer reporting will be based on data from Google Analytics 4, utilizing OWOX BI. Our analysts can transform this data into a simulated structure and use it to create reports in OWOX BI Smart Data. These reports are valuable because they are:
Such reports won’t break if you make any changes (for example, change the data source for a visitor object from Universal to Google Analytics 4) since all changes are made at the data model level.
The migration path to Google Analytics 4 can differ for various businesses. For details, book a demo meeting with our experts to learn about upgrading to Google Analytics 4 with OWOX BI.
As of 2025, the shift to Google Analytics 4 is no longer optional, as Universal Analytics has been fully retired. However, many businesses are still adjusting to the platform's new structure and interface, particularly in managing multiple data streams.
GA4 offers powerful benefits, including cross-platform tracking, event-based data, advanced insights, and improved alignment with privacy standards. Delaying migration risks losing historical data critical for informed decision-making. Since GA4 stores data for only up to 14 months in the standard (free) tier, while GA4 360 extends retention to 50 months, businesses should act quickly to set up parallel tracking, preserve key insights, and adapt their reporting systems accordingly.
