GA4 vs. Universal Analytics: What’s the Difference?

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What are session-based and event-based data models?

Analytics organizes data into sessions in UA properties, which serve as the basis for all reporting. A session is a collection of user interactions with your website that occur over a specific period of time. Page views, events, and e-commerce transactions are just a few examples of user interactions that Analytics records and stores as visits over the course of a session. Depending on how a person uses your website, a single session may include multiple visits.

About the event-driven model?
Although Analytics collects and retains user interactions with your website or app as events, you can still view session data in GA4 properties. Events, including page views, button clicks, user actions, or system events, give you insight into what's happening on your website or in your app.

Events can collect and report data that further explains the user's action or chinese overseas provides additional context for the event or user. This data can include details such as the cost of the purchase, the URL of the page the user visited, or their precise location. While this may not seem like much, this difference is huge.

Ways to track an event like link clicks in GA4 vs UA
We are aware that Universal Analytics uses pageviews to track data. As a result, GA may record a pageview when a URL is loaded. While it does not track user actions on the tracked domain, that does prevent a new page from loading. This covers actions such as clicking on videos, clicking on pages within the domain, and clicking on pages outside the domain. It is essential to use Google Tag Manager for Universal Analytics to measure "events" such as link click tracking and button click tracking.

For marketers approaching this for the first time, it can be difficult and time-consuming. Setting up variables, triggers, and tags (like the tag setup below) to track particular events that Google Analytics will record as data. The “event parameters” that are pre-designated with names like category, action, and tag are the most significant difference compared to GA4. These “parameters” send additional data with our event that we can use to interpret the data.

Category = link_click: This is a hard-coded event parameter to be displayed whenever the tag is triggered.
Label = “Page URL” – The curly braces designate a variable that will capture different data depending on the specific page the visitor was on when they clicked the link.
Action = “Click URL” – The braces designate a variable that will capture different data depending on which link is clicked.