Google Analytics in plain language

What is GA4, and why don't the old guides add up?

The old Google Analytics (“Universal Analytics”) stopped measuring in 2023, and in 2024 Google shut it down for good - today's GA4 is a fundamentally new system. The most important difference: everything a visitor does is an “event” - a page load, a scroll, a click, even a file download. That makes the interface feel foreign at first, but for everyday use you only need to understand a handful of numbers - and we'll go through them in a moment.

The division of labor between the two Google tools is simple: Search Console covers the story BEFORE the visit (what people searched for, how often you appeared in the results), while Analytics covers what happens AFTER (what visitors did on your site, and where all your traffic came from - not just Google). The two can also be linked, and together they give you the full picture.

The four numbers worth watching

Active users shows how many people visited you. One important detail: by default GA4 only counts “active” visitors - those who had a meaningful visit, or who came to your site for the first time. The number of sessions is always higher: it counts visits, and one person can come back several times. After half an hour of silence, the next click counts as a new session.

The engagement rate is the “quality score” of your visits: it tells you what percentage of visits showed genuine interest - lasted longer than 10 seconds, viewed more than one page, or included a key event. It replaced the old “bounce rate”; bounce rate still exists, but it is hidden from the reports by default, and it is the exact opposite: the share of visits that did NOT engage.

Key events are your business goals: a form submission, a phone-number click, a purchase - you decide which events count as goals. If older articles call them “conversions”: same thing, Google renamed them in 2024.

And one thing almost nobody tells beginners: GA4's numbers are always lower than reality. Anyone who declines tracking on the cookie banner, or uses an ad blocker, simply never makes it into the statistics. This is not a bug - it is how the system is supposed to work - so watch the trends (is it growing or shrinking?), not the absolute numbers.

1. Active users + sessions: the trend of your traffic - check monthly, over a 3-month horizon.
2. Engagement rate: are your visitors finding what they are looking for?
3. Key events: this is where customers come from - in your first month, set up at least form submissions and phone clicks.
4. Pages and screens report: which of your pages are working, and which are not.

Where do visitors come from? - the two reports everyone mixes up

In GA4, two similarly named reports show where your traffic comes from, and most misunderstandings start here. User acquisition looks at where a visitor came from the very first time, ever - once per person. Traffic acquisition, on the other hand, counts the source of every single visit, including returning ones. If Kata found you via Google on Monday and came back from your Facebook post on Thursday: in User acquisition she stays “Google” forever, while in Traffic acquisition her Thursday visit lands under Facebook. For everyday use, Traffic acquisition is the more useful one.

GA4 sorts sources into channels: Direct (typed address or bookmark), Organic Search (free Google results), Organic Social (Facebook/Instagram links), Referral (links from other websites), Email, the paid channels (Paid) - and since 2026 there is a dedicated AI Assistants channel: visitors arriving from ChatGPT, Gemini and friends. If you see “Unassigned”, it usually means a badly tagged campaign link.

The Realtime report shows the last 30 minutes with minute-by-minute freshness - it is your most useful tool for checking whether tracking is working at all.

How Analytics gets onto your website

Setting it up is not programming, but there are a few steps. The gist: you create a “property” for your site in Analytics, you get a measurement ID (it starts with a G), and that is what needs to go into your site. On a WordPress site the easiest route is Google's own free Site Kit plugin - it connects not only Analytics without editing any code, but Search Console too.

1. Create an account and a property at analytics.google.com.
2. Add a web data stream with your site's address - you'll receive your G-XXXX… measurement ID.
3. Add it to your site: on WordPress with the Site Kit plugin, or by pasting the tracking code into the header.
4. Connect it to cookie consent: on an EU site, tracking may only start after the visitor agrees (more on this in the next section).
5. Verify with the Realtime report: open your site, and you should see yourself. The standard reports can lag by 24-48 hours - “zero data” on day one is not a bug!

Cookies and GDPR: what a Hungarian site cannot skip

In the EU - including Hungary - Google Analytics can only be used lawfully if the visitor consents first: you need a cookie banner, and the tracking code may only start after acceptance. Related to this is Google's Consent Mode v2, mandatory since 2024 for anyone who also uses Google advertising features. Good news: you don't need to worry about IP addresses - GA4 never stores them, and for European visitors it discards them on an EU server.

There are, however, three settings worth making on the day you connect it - these cannot be fixed retroactively:

1. Data retention from 2 to 14 months: by default, GA4 deletes detailed data after two months! (Admin, then Data settings, then Data retention.)
2. Filter out your own traffic: add your own IP address as internal traffic, otherwise you'll be measuring your own clicks too.
3. Link Search Console (Admin, then Product links): your Google Search data flows into Analytics as well.

The most common pitfalls

“Zero data, it's broken!” - In the first days the standard reports can look empty: processing takes hours, and a full day's data can lag by up to 12 hours. Always verify that tracking works with the Realtime report, not the standard reports.

Realtime and the reports don't match. They go through separate processing - a small difference between them is normal.

It doesn't match Search Console. It never will: Search Console counts the click on Google's servers, before your page even loads; Analytics measures in the browser, after loading and consent. The gap between the two is natural - industry experience puts it typically around 20-30%, varying by site.

“(not set)” and “Unassigned” rows. These indicate missing data - Unassigned typically comes from a badly tagged campaign link. In small amounts it is normal, no need to panic.

Disappearing detailed data. If you didn't set data retention to 14 months, you won't see data older than two months in Explorations analyses - the aggregated standard reports are unaffected, but changing this setting is still a day-one task.

Where is Analytics heading? - AI features

GA4 is gaining artificial-intelligence features at a fast pace. With Benchmarking you can compare your own numbers to the average of similar businesses; Generated insights summarizes in plain text what has changed in your data since your last login; and Ask Advisor (beta) is a conversational assistant you can simply ask: “which of my pages brought the most leads last month?”. And as people increasingly get their answers from AI, Analytics is keeping up: in the AI Assistants channel you can already see how many visitors arrived from ChatGPT or Gemini - in a few years this will be as natural a source as Google Search is today.

Frequently asked questions