GA4 (Google Analytics 4)

In UA, pageviews and sessions were first-class, automatically structured metrics with a fixed definition, and everything else (goals, events) was layered around them. In GA4, everything is an event — a pageview is simply an automatically-collected event type alongside custom events — and sessions are derived from event timing rather than being the primary organising structure. This is a genuinely different mental model, not just a UI redesign, and teams that try to map UA reports directly onto equivalent GA4 reports often find the numbers don't reconcile exactly, because the underlying definitions (what counts as a session, how engagement is calculated) changed alongside the interface.

GA4 replaces UA's Goals with 'key events' — any collected event (automatic or custom) that a property marks as a conversion. This is more flexible than UA's fixed goal types, but it also means conversion tracking in GA4 requires deliberately identifying and marking the right events, since GA4 doesn't automatically know which of a business's many collected events represents genuine business value without explicit configuration.

GA4 defaults to a data-driven attribution model across all conversion reporting, replacing UA's more rigid last-click default — meaning credit for a conversion is distributed across multiple touchpoints in a user's journey based on a machine-learning model, rather than assigning full credit to the final click before conversion. This generally gives organic search a more accurate, often larger, share of credit for assisted conversions than a last-click model would, but it also makes channel-by-channel comparisons less intuitively simple than a strict last-click model, since credit is fractional and model-dependent rather than absolute.

For SEO reporting, the most relevant GA4 views are the Traffic Acquisition report filtered to the Organic Search channel (for engagement and conversion metrics by landing page), cross-referenced against Search Console's Performance report (for the query-level and impression/click data GA4 doesn't capture at all — GA4 knows nothing about search queries or SERP impressions, only what happens after a click lands on the site).

Building a combined view — Search Console for pre-click visibility metrics, GA4 for post-click engagement and conversion metrics — gives the complete picture; relying on either tool alone leaves a significant blind spot in one half of the funnel.

The most damaging and surprisingly common mistake is never configuring key events at all, leaving GA4 collecting rich event data with no way to distinguish which events represent actual business value — a technically correct GA4 install that nonetheless can't answer basic ROI questions because no one ever marked which events matter.

For a local service business, the highest-value GA4 configuration work is marking form submissions and, critically, phone-call clicks or dynamic call-tracking events as key events, then building a saved Organic Search-filtered exploration report combining landing page, key event completions, and device — since a large share of local service search happens on mobile, where the call-click behaviour differs meaningfully from desktop form-based conversion behaviour.