GA4, short for Google Analytics 4, is the current version of Google's free website analytics, the tool that tells you how many people visit your site, where they came from, and what they do once they arrive. It replaced the older Universal Analytics in the middle of 2023, and Google switched the old version off, so if your reports suddenly looked unfamiliar around then, this is why. The biggest change is what GA4 counts. The old version was built around page views, meaning how many times each page loaded. GA4 is built around events, meaning the actions people take: a form submitted, a button clicked, a video played, a file downloaded. That shift is good news for a small business, because the questions you actually care about are usually about actions, not pages. "How many people booked a call this month" is a clearer measure of whether the site is working than "how many people looked at the contact page." The catch is that GA4 reads differently from the old reports, so the numbers are not directly comparable, and it takes a little setup to track the events that matter to you.
Glossary entry