Google Analytics 4 is the current version of Google Analytics. It replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped collecting data on July 1, 2023. If your site has Google Analytics today, it’s GA4.
Where Google Search Console tells you what happens in Google’s results before someone clicks, GA4 tells you what happens after they arrive: which pages they visit, how long they stay engaged, and whether they call, fill in a form or buy.
How GA4 works
Everything in GA4 is an event. A page view is an event. So is a scroll, a click on a phone number, a form submission or a purchase. Some are collected automatically, others you set up. Events you care most about can be marked as key events (Google renamed “conversions” to key events in 2024), which is how GA4 measures results.
GA4 also replaced bounce rate as the main engagement measure with engagement rate: the share of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a key event, or viewed at least two pages.
The reports that matter for SEO
- Traffic acquisition, filtered to “Organic Search”, shows how many sessions came from search engines and how engaged they were.
- Landing pages show which pages people enter the site on, and how each performs.
- Key events by channel show how many leads or sales organic search produced.
- Explorations let you build custom views, for example organic landing pages by device.
Why it matters
Coastline Plumbing gets 2,400 organic sessions a month. That sounds healthy, but GA4 shows 70% land on an old blog post about unclogging drains yourself, with almost no calls. The water heater repair page gets only 300 organic sessions but produces most of the phone-click key events. That shifts priorities: improve rankings for the pages that bring in jobs.
Common mistakes
- Not setting up key events. Without them, GA4 shows traffic but not results. At minimum, track form submissions, phone number clicks and purchases or bookings.
- Expecting numbers to match Search Console. Clicks and sessions are counted differently, and consent banners, ad blockers and privacy settings mean analytics never captures every visit.
- Leaving default data retention. GA4 keeps detailed event data for two months by default; raise it to 14 months in Admin settings.
- Internal traffic polluting the data. Filter out your own team’s visits.
Using it in RankThat
RankThat connects to Google Analytics 4 so traffic and conversion figures appear next to rankings and Search Console data, and in the monthly SEO reports, which compare periods fairly (per day, month on month and year on year). Organic traffic trends are easier to explain when they sit alongside rankings.