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19 Popular GA4 Questions (With The Right Answers From Our Expert Analysts)

By Jason Ohsie| 13 Min Read | August 1, 2025
GA4 Implementation | GA4 Explained | Google Analytics Graphic

This article was updated 08/1/2025.

Do you have GA4 questions about how to harness the latest generation of Google Analytics for your business? Whether you’re looking to interpret user behavior, optimize campaigns, or make data-driven decisions, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) gives you the insights to succeed.

GA4 offers a unique opportunity to gain deeper insights into what drives your customers, as well as to fine-tune your marketing strategies accordingly. 

Do you want to know how GA4 can help your company grow with confidence? Get your popcorn ready. We’re about to embark on an exciting journey into the world of analytics, where rich data awaits to unlock the potential of your brand.

We’ve asked our in-house GA4 specialists to answer the most common and essential GA4 questions that marketers like you face daily.

With GA4, you can track user interactions across all their devices, gain greater insights into user journeys, and supercharge your digital marketing strategies. Get ready to discover the full scope of GA4’s powerful capabilities and how they can revolutionize your business. Let’s begin the journey towards uncovering the full potential of this powerful tool.

What Makes Google Analytics 4 (GA4) a Game-Changer for Marketers?

GA4 primarily uses an event-based data model, which adds great flexibility and granularity to your tracking capability. This allows for a deeper understanding of user behavior, capturing specific actions like video plays, scrolls, and form submissions, rather than just focusing on sessions and page views.

Biggest Takeaway: Traffic and sessions still matter greatly in GA4! However, the way GA4 defines sessions—using the session_start event and tracking engaged sessions—means you should analyze trends within the GA4 platform itself. If you’re asking GA4 questions about traffic discrepancies, the key is to focus on consistency within the same data model.

Greater Customization

GA4 doesn’t rely on predefined, static reports. Instead, it gives you powerful tools to generate insights tailored to your website and business objectives. It introduces custom definitions (parameters) to replace older limitations, offering more flexibility in data collection and analysis.

Biggest Takeaway: Your analytics setup should reflect your unique business needs, not just mimic an old platform. GA4 allows you to do this, but its learning curve can be steep. A GA4 specialist can help guide your setup for maximum insight and usability.

BigQuery integration

GA4 offers free native integration with BigQuery for advanced analysis and reporting.

Biggest Takeaway: With BigQuery and GA4 combined, you can achieve advanced reporting and long-term data storage. This is especially useful for creating dashboards in tools like Looker Studio or managing around GA4’s limited API quota.

AI-powered insights

GA4 leverages machine learning to provide predictive metrics and audience-building tools. These help digital marketers make smarter decisions and optimize ad campaigns.

Biggest Takeaway: With smart bidding in Google Ads becoming the norm, the ability to feed high-quality data from GA4 into your campaigns is crucial. If you’re wondering how to best leverage these features, consult a GA4 specialist to help you build the right strategy.

How can digital marketing managers benefit from the improved data integration and cross-platform tracking in GA4?

For businesses that leverage mobile apps in addition to websites, the enhanced cross-platform tracking allows for a more seamless experience when comparing data streams. Because Google Analytics, Firebase, and GA4 are all events-based models, they are leveraging a similar data schema that allows for cross-platform comparison of data. 

In terms of integrations, GA4 integrates well with the core Google stack via:

  • Google Ads
  • BigQuery
  • Firebase
  • Looker Studio

This connectivity allows digital marketing managers to fully utilize GA4’s default data-driven attribution, improved cross-device tracking, and robust user behavior insights.

If you’ve been searching for answers to your GA4 questions about implementation and setup, this is one area where a GA4 specialist can help ensure your integrations are aligned with your marketing goals.

What new insights can GA4 provide for digital marketing campaigns?

Enhanced audience segmentation

GA4 enables digital marketing managers to create dynamic audience lists based on a wide range of user attributes, behaviors, and events. This enhanced segmentation can reveal new insights into how different audience segments interact with marketing campaigns, allowing for more precise targeting and personalization.

Customizable funnels

GA4 allows digital marketing managers to create customizable funnels with multiple touchpoints and conversion events, providing a deeper understanding of the user journey. By analyzing these funnels, managers can identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement, optimizing their campaigns to drive more conversions.

How do GA4’s machine learning capabilities improve data analysis and prediction for digital marketing managers?

GA4’s predictive metrics, like Purchase Probability and Churn Probability, can provide valuable insights into users’ future actions. Digital marketing managers can use this information to proactively target users who are more likely to convert or re-engage those at risk of churning, leading to more effective and efficient campaigns.

How can digital marketing managers leverage GA4’s enhanced audience segmentation features to target their campaigns more effectively?

Develop dynamic remarketing campaigns

With GA4’s advanced audience segmentation capabilities, digital marketing managers can create dynamic remarketing campaigns that are tailored to each user’s specific interactions with their website or app. For example, they can target users who have viewed a particular product category but haven’t made a purchase yet, encouraging them to complete the transaction with personalized offers or recommendations.

Optimize audience bid adjustments

GA4’s audience segmentation features can be used to identify high-value audience segments that generate the most conversions or have the highest lifetime value. Digital marketing managers can then increase bid adjustments for these segments in their Google Ads campaigns, ensuring their ads are more likely to be shown to users who are most likely to convert.

Improve content personalization

By leveraging GA4’s audience segmentation features, digital marketing managers can gain insights into the preferences and interests of their target audience. This information can be used to create personalized content and offers that cater to each segment’s needs and preferences, leading to better user experiences and higher engagement rates.

What are the best practices for setting up GA4 for optimal data collection and reporting?

The best approach we’ve found is to spend time planning what you want to see out of your analytics. This means creating a measurement strategy that mirrors your marketing goals and trying to find ways to mirror those goal KPIs and metrics in your reporting. 

Additionally, GA4 has more robust platform reports, but requires detailed understanding of your setup to maximize its usage. Not everyone in your organization will feasibly want to get to this level of understanding, which means the better approach can be customized dashboards that answer “What questions do I want answered from my web data?”. 

In terms of GA4 configuration best practices, here is a handy GA4 checklist that is comprehensive and easy-to-setup.

How can digital marketing managers benefit from GAS4’s event-based tracking?

GA4’s event-based tracking model allows for deep insights into user behavior by capturing specific actions such as form submissions, video views, downloads, scroll depth, and more. For lead generation sites with lots of forms or gated content, you can define custom event parameters like form_name, content_type, and form_id to evaluate the performance of individual assets.

Audience segmentation can also reveal patterns of behavior. For example, you can analyze which events are common among users who convert, versus those who don’t. These insights make it easier to fine-tune your site’s content and user flows for higher conversion rates.

GA4 also offers enhanced ecommerce tracking, with funnel reports that let you visualize when users:

  • Add items to their cart
  • View their cart
  • Begin the checkout process
  • Complete a purchase

This level of detail gives digital marketing managers clear visibility into conversion drop-off points, which can be used to inform site optimizations.

What are the key data visualization features in GA4 that can help digital marketing managers make more informed decisions?

While it requires intimate knowledge of your GA4 configuration, the free form or blank report allows you to set up a custom report to compare events to custom dimensions and metrics. 

GA4’s funnel reporting and path exploration reports are significantly improved over previous tools, offering more detailed insights into user behavior and conversion paths. That said, they aren’t intuitive and require a baseline knowledge of GA4’s event model and setup.

There are limitations to comparing session-scoped and event data that Google introduced in December 2022. Unfortunately, blending this type of data together would require BigQuery or another alternative.

How do GA4’s privacy and consent features help digital marketing managers comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA?

Privacy and consent features

GA4 offers better privacy controls, including consent mode and data deletion capabilities, helping marketers comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

What If Your GA4 Setup Isn’t Delivering the Insights You Expected?

If your GA4 property isn’t producing the kind of insights you were hoping for, it may be due to configuration gaps, not the platform itself. Many marketers launch GA4 using only default settings, which rarely reflect the specific KPIs or business goals they care about.

It’s one of the most common GA4 questions we hear: “Why doesn’t my dashboard answer the questions I care about?”

A GA4 specialist can help you audit your setup, create a proper data layer (primarily through GTM), and build custom dashboards aligned with your goals.

What are the top GA4 integrations that digital marketing managers should consider for their marketing tech stack?

Google Ads: Link your GA4 property with your Google Ads account to analyze ad performance and optimize your campaigns.

Google Search Console: Integrate GA4 with Google Search Console to monitor organic search performance and identify optimization opportunities.

Google Data Studio: Connect GA4 with Google Data Studio to create custom data visualizations and interactive reports.

BigQuery: Integrate GA4 with BigQuery for advanced data analysis and reporting capabilities.

Firebase: Connect GA4 with Firebase to track app performance and user engagement.

Most other software platforms are leveraging the GA4 API, but are adapting to changes to provide solutions including Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, etc.

How can digital marketing managers use GA4’s conversion modeling to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns more accurately?

GA4 Conversion modeling refers to how GA4 estimates some conversions that it doesn’t observe directly based on the modeling of data. This doesn’t mean that the data is less trustworthy necessarily, but it is a clear difference versus Universal Analytics. There are a couple of main implications that a digital marketing manager should be aware of, which are that recent conversion data may be subject to change. The modeling may result in a shift of recent conversion data, so understand that numbers may change slightly over time. The other major implication is that Google Analytics is best used when thinking about patterns and trended data versus stressing over exact numbers. As it is, with Apple’s Intelligent tracking protection and increasing changes to data privacy, there is less guarantee of completely accurate data, but overall trends and sample sizes should still inform strategic decision-making.

What are the recommended GA4 training resources for digital marketing managers to get up to speed quickly?

Looking to answer your own GA4 questions and build confidence in the platform? Of course, the DOM blog is a great resource! But beyond that:

  • Analyticsmania.com
  • Measureschool.com
  • Simoahova.com

How can GA4’s enhanced ecommerce tracking features help digital marketing managers optimize their online store performance?

GA4 provides very clear pathways for evaluating checkout funnels and overall product performance. Understanding how different traffic channels are performing in terms of conversion events is critical and should help inform how conversion optimization efforts are taken on-site. GA4 is not the answer to why problems happen – behavioral analytics tools such as heat-mapping or A/B testing help better with this – but GA4 can help pinpoint where conversion drop-off points are happening as well as provide clues for what problems may exist.

What are the top GA4 custom reports and dashboards that digital marketing managers should create for better campaign monitoring?

The most powerful visualizations would be connecting GA4 to other visualization platforms such as Google Looker Studio, Tableau, or other visualization alternatives. Ideally, to avoid the GA4 quota issue, these SEO, PPC, and general marketing dashboards are generated with integration from BigQuery or another data warehouse/database system.

How can GA4’s predictive metrics help digital marketing managers optimize their budget allocation and campaign targeting?

GA4 predictive audiences is the most likely application that uses machine learning to predict custom audiences such as those likely to convert or those likely to churn. Keep in mind, your website needs enough of a data set to be able to have these insights generated. 

I am not getting the same kind of insights I want out of my GA4. How do I fix this?

  1. Generate a measurement strategy that identifies the business goals, marketing goals,  KPIs, and metrics that are important for a business. 
  2. Install GA4 through GTM. The biggest challenge is likely in this step, as there are a lot of custom CMS websites that don’t have a proper data layer setup to capture the right data in GTM. 
  3. Integrate GA4 with the Google stack.
  4. Generate a custom dashboard that answers the most important questions you want answered about your data. 

DOM offers expert GA4 analytics setup and training if you need help with the above.

How can digital marketing managers use GA4’s advanced analysis techniques to gain deeper insights into user behavior and campaign performance?

Integrating GA4 and Google Ads data with BigQuery unleashes the ability to blend data and evaluate performance through deeper data analysis. Within the platform, there are powerful insights, but to be able to manipulate and blend data together, which is only possible with external solutions, will further untap its potential.

What is the future of GA4, and how can digital marketing managers stay updated on the latest developments and features?

GA4 is continually evolving and is most powerful when digital marketing managers spend the time to understand its nuances. Hopefully, GA4 will become more feature-rich and adjustments to the UI will help to lower the learning curve for brand-new users. 

GA4 is meant to be integrated with Google Tag Manager and it would be very difficult and time-consuming to be maintained through hard-coded gtag. 

The data landscape will also likely be changing with the popularity and dynamic changes resulting from AI and data privacy laws. It is up to digital marketing managers to stay current as things are rapidly developing.

You Made It To The End?

If you’ve made it to the bottom of this post, you just uncovered some crucial insights into optimizing your analytics strategies with GA4. 

With answers to 19 vital questions, you’ve gained the foundation to build a solid data-driven approach for your brand. 

Have a question you didn’t see answered above? Contact us and let us know – our GA4 specialists are always eager to help you grow online with confidence

Thank you for diving in with us, and let us know if we can support you with our top-rated marketing analytics services as you complete your GA4 migration journey.

This article was updated to add additional information on August 1st, 2025.


Jason Ohsie

Written by Jason Ohsie

Jason Ohsie is our Strategy & Analysis Department Manager. He brings a decorated background in marketing leadership for eCommerce, higher education, and B2B marketing firms to his responsibility for helping our client campaigns grow with confidence. He has an Economics degree from NYU and his favorite job (by far) is being a proud dad.

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