Google Analytics is the free tool Google offers to measure people’s behavior on your website. Current version: GA4, which replaced Universal Analytics in 2023. The difference matters because GA4 changed the whole measurement logic: not by session, but by events. And that confuses anyone coming from the previous version.

What GA4 does, briefly

When someone visits your site, GA4 records a series of events: page visit, scroll, click, download, purchase. Each event can carry parameters (which product was viewed, what value the purchase had, what source brought them). All that information accumulates in the Analytics account and lets you answer business questions.

Questions GA4 answers well

  • Where do people come from? Organic traffic (SEO), paid (Ads), direct, social, referrals.
  • What pages do they view? Which work, which they abandon.
  • How many convert and from where? Lead, purchase, signup — attribution by channel.
  • How long do they stay? An imperfect but useful indicator of content quality.
  • Does the funnel work? If you configured key events, you can see where people drop off.

Questions GA4 does NOT answer well

  • Who exactly each user is. GA4 works with aggregated, anonymous data.
  • Why they do what they do. That’s what surveys, interviews, or tools like Hotjar/Clarity (heatmaps + recordings) are for.
  • 100% accurate attribution. With third-party cookies dying, GA4 models with sampling and predictions. Useful, not exact.

Metrics that genuinely matter

What matters isn’t knowing how many visits you had. It’s knowing what those visits brought you. Some metrics that do matter:

  • Conversion rate per channel. Which source brings buyers, not just clicks?
  • Cost per acquisition per channel. Traffic that costs more than it yields has to be adjusted or paused.
  • Bounce rate in context. Not good or bad on its own — depends on page type.
  • Engagement rate. Replaces the old bounce rate in GA4. More useful.
  • Assisted conversions. Channels that didn’t close the sale but helped along the way.

The vanity metrics

They’ll tempt you. Resist:

  • “Visits grew 80%” — and the conversions?
  • “Time on page: 4 minutes” — were they reading or stuck?
  • “We lowered bounce rate” — only useful if conversions also improved.

The minimum setup your site needs

  1. GA4 installed via Google Tag Manager (cleaner than direct code).
  2. Key events configured as conversions. Minimum: form submitted, WhatsApp click, purchase, PDF download.
  3. Cross-domain tracking if you have more than one domain.
  4. Filters for internal IPs. We don’t want to count your team as visits.
  5. Connection with Google Ads and Search Console. To see the full funnel.

Without these five steps, what you see in GA4 is partial information.

Analysis vs. reporting

There’s a difference. A report shows what happened (visits, conversions, sources). An analysis explains why and proposes what to do. A pretty GA4 dashboard without analysis is decoration.

Privacy and GDPR/local data laws

GA4 collects visitor data, so your site needs a cookie banner, an updated privacy policy, and, in Colombia, compliance with the habeas data law. Not optional, and Google gets stricter every release.

The bottom line

Google Analytics doesn’t tell you what to do. It shows what’s happening. The difference between growing brands and stagnant ones is what they do with that information: the first ones use it to adjust; the second ones store it in reports no one reads.

Mediocre to have GA installed and never open it. Better to have one actionable metric you review every Monday.