GA3 vs GA4 comparaison (Free dashboard)
You’re transitioning from Universal analytics to Google analytics 4 and you’re wondering why your data isn’t the same on both plateforms ? You don’t know where to find the differences in your data ? This article (and dashboard) is for you !
During this last month I decided to develop a dashboard that will be connected to both versions of Google Analytics (3 & 4) and will allow every companies to compare their data on the mains topics (Main KPIs, acquisition, ecommerce, etc.). My job is done, let’s see it together :
link to the free dashboard below ⬇️
1st Page: Global KPIs
Screenshot from page 1, this page also contains a top pages table, average time on site, bounce rate and conversion rate.
Here are your mains KPIs one by one so you can compare and check if everything clean. How to know if your potential gaps between the two versions are ok or not ? Answer by Google :
Users : Total users become Active users in Google analytics 4 and has a more challenging algorithm that excludes users with no hit that could be present in Universal analytics and lead to higher volume.
Sessions : You can have up to 20% discrepancies. Sessions no longer restart at midnight and after a change of UTM parameter.
Pageviews : 10% of difference is pretty normal according to Google, unique pageviews no longer exist as you’ll have to count the number of user by page_view to recreate this KPI.
Bounce rate : Should be lower on the last version because it only take engaged session (that stay at least 10sec on your website).
Events : It’s supposed to be equivalent in term of volume but in reality the difference between GA3 which had only 3 event dimensions and GA4 which has many more can create some difference. Also don’t forget that pageviews are now events !
Conversion rate : In GA4, every goal and conversion is used to calculate the conversion rate whereas only unique conversion is used in GA3.
2nd Page : Audiences
In this page you’ll find informations on gender, age, geolocation, language, device, browser. Version on browser is not available on GA4. Tendances here should be almost the same but even on this example (Google merchandising website) there is some difference.
3rd Page : Acquisition
Everything you need to know about acquisition is compiled here ! Channels, sources, mediums, campaigns, keywords. Users can vary a bit but the traffic coming from acquisitions should look very similar.
4th Page : Ecommerce
Your conversion funnel, step by step. On this screenshot with the public data (Google merch website) you can see that some steps have tracking issues. It’s an important page that will allow you to verify each step and to see if there is any increasing or decreasing traffic for each one of them. The goals here are to check if you have any tagging issues and understand the way your funnel data is impacted by the new version.
5th Page : Events
You want to dig on a specific event ? That’s the page you’re looking for. These visualisations will help you compare your different events and the filter will allow you to look for a specific one. I would recommend, if you recreated event category, action and label in your event custom dimension to add them in the dashboard for a better comparaison.
How to get the dashboard ?
Go to the product page and buy it for free, no card needed.
You will receive a PDF with a link to the lookerstudio or a .pbix file for PowerBI.
On lookerstudio, copy the dashboard and link your data as explained in the PDF file.
Explore your date !
I hope this article helped you.
As GA3 no longer exist this dashboard is not anymore available.
We worked on new SEO dashboard to help you grow your website. Check it here !
