GA4 · Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4
What is GA4?
- Google’s free web and app analytics tool; GA4 is the current version
- A shift from page-view-centered measurement (UA) to event-centered measurement
- Tracks traffic sources, behavior, and conversions to prove results
The moment you install GA4, what changes isn't the report format but the kind of questions asked in meetings. Instead of 'How did the blog do this month?', you start asking, 'Of 12 inquiries, 7 came from search. Which page did those 7 see first?' Where session- and pageview-based measurement could only answer 'how many came,' event-based measurement records where people stopped scrolling and which buttons they clicked. It is less a traffic-reporting tool than an evidence-gathering system that protects your content budget.
In practice, you first need to know the line between what is captured automatically and what you have to set up. With enhanced measurement on, page views, 90% scrolls, outbound link clicks, file downloads, and site search are collected without code changes. By contrast, conversions such as contact form submissions or consultation requests only produce numbers once you create the event yourself and mark it as a 'key event'. The default data retention period is also 2 months, so unless you change it to 14 months in the admin settings, year-over-year comparisons become impossible.
In B2B, you also need to draw clear limits around GA4. It is an anonymous aggregation tool, so it can't tell you 'which person at which company visited,' and for deals that take 3 to 6 months to evaluate, the first touchpoint easily falls outside the default 90-day attribution window. That is why we recommend a setup that passes GA4's client_id along on form submission and stores it in the CRM lead record. It is much safer to split the roles: GA4 for channel- and content-level decisions, CRM and marketing automation for person-level tracking.
The most common mistake is installing the tag and then letting six months go by. With no conversions configured, the screen just piles up visit counts, and '8,000 visits' is the only card you can play in a budget-cut meeting. If internal IPs are not excluded and employee and partner traffic gets mixed in, you pick the wrong pages as winners and your whole content direction goes off course. Another risk is declaring a channel the winner based on three or four leads. With fewer than 30 conversions a month, treat GA4 figures as reference points, not verdicts.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Junyoung NohConsumer and generational trend analyst & AI content marketing specialistThe fourth generation of Google Analytics, a product line that began when Google acquired Urchin in 2005. It launched in 2020 and became the standard when Universal Analytics (UA) was shut down in 2023.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a maker of industrial automation parts (180 employees, annual revenue of about KRW 42 billion (≈ US$31,423,000)), had built up 60+ blog posts over two years, yet monthly inquiries stayed at 3. In an executive meeting, someone asked, 'Why do we keep spending KRW 40 million (≈ US$29,900) a year on content?' The marketing team had no evidence showing which posts generated inquiries.
- When Marketing Manager Kim redid the GA4 setup and excluded 12 internal IP addresses, it turned out that 1,900 of the 8,400 monthly visits came from employees and partner companies.
- The inquiry form had no confirmation page, so conversions kept showing as 0. The fix was to ask the dev team to add an event to the submit button and register 'inquiry submitted' as a key event.
- They standardized the UTM rules for ads, newsletters, and trade-show QR links into a single one-page table. This came after the sales director put it bluntly: 'If half our traffic is direct with no source, that's not reporting, it's guessing.'
- Opening three months of data showed that 13 of 21 inquiries came through 3 articles from the 'equipment pre-purchase checklist' series, while the 18 carefully written company news posts produced not a single conversion.
- Kim, the marketing manager, cut publishing from 8 posts a month to 3 and focused on checklist-style topics. Six months later, monthly inquiries rose from 3 to 11, and the content budget stayed intact, with no cuts.