If GA4 feels like it was built by someone who has never run a campaign, that’s because it was — it was built around events, not marketing reports. The good news: once you stop looking for the old sessions-and-pageviews world and learn how GA4 actually thinks, it gets manageable fast. The whole job is translation.
The shift in one sentence
Universal Analytics counted sessions and pageviews. GA4 counts events — every action a user takes is an event, and a “conversion” is simply an event you’ve flagged as important. That single change is why your old reports have no obvious twin: the unit of measurement moved underneath them.
Universal Analytics, translated
| Universal Analytics | GA4 equivalent | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions | Sessions (redefined) | Counted differently — don’t compare 1:1 to old data |
| Bounce rate | Engagement rate | Roughly the inverse; retire bounce as an “outcome” |
| Goals | Key events (conversions) | You decide what counts as a conversion |
| Pageviews | Views | Web pages and app screens are now combined |
| Avg. session duration | Average engagement time | Measures active time, not idle tabs |
What quietly broke
The five-minute setup that saves you later
Get these right on day one and you skip most of the “the data looks wrong” tickets down the line:
- Flag only real outcomes as key events — not every button click.
- Set data retention to the maximum (14 months); the default is shorter.
- Link Google Ads and switch on the BigQuery export now — it’s free, and you’ll want the raw events.
- Filter internal and developer traffic before it poisons your baselines.
- Rebuild your few essential UA views as Explorations so the team isn’t lost.
The five reports that actually matter
Ignore most of the default menu. These are the ones marketers open more than once:
- Acquisition by channel — where conversions come from, fed by clean UTM tags.
- Conversions by key event — the outcomes you flagged, trended over time.
- Landing-page performance — built as an Exploration, since the canned report is thin.
- Funnel exploration — where people fall out between first visit and conversion.
- Retention — for any content or product play where return visits are the point.
GA4 only tells the truth when the data going in is clean, which loops straight back to UTM hygiene. Tag well, flag the right events, and the platform finally earns its keep. When you’re ready to stop living inside the GA4 UI, Maven pipes those events into reports your clients can actually read.
Jamie Isabel
Founder at Maven
