There are a whole bunch of new ways of thinking or new features that come your way with GA4, some of which we’ve touched upon above. We’d strongly encourage users to take this opportunity to learn more about analytics in general (i.e. what it can do for you as a discipline), but also how to get the most out of GA4. Since you’re being asked to move to and learn a new(ish) system, it’s a natural time to spend a little more time learning more than just the basics. Some key new features to consider are below:

• As mentioned above, the event-based approach is the key to understanding some of the really smart bits of GA4. Rather than add code to record “conversions” via a “thank you” page as one might in UA, in GA4 all interactions can be recorded as events which leads to a much richer picture of what users are doing leading up to (or not completing) conversion
• Custom metrics and dimensions: there’s real power in this area of GA4, which allows users to create their own measurements, and add richer data to events that can help with analysis and optimisation down the line (e.g. tracking the number of phone calls generated, or being able to see revenue broken down by different payment methods rather than as a total)
• There’s a ‘Explore’ tab which gives users the freedom to build their own exploratory reports really quickly, and share them (although the date range is somewhat limiting)
• It’s possible to change most of the navigation in the main interface to only include the reports you’re interested in, or group things in a way that makes sense to you and your workflows
• Cross-device tracking: when setting up a property you get to add sections for the web/Android/iOS ‘streams’. If you have users logging in on the web and apps, then it’s possible to set up GA4 to track those users and understand the size of the overlap.