GA4, short for Google Analytics 4, is Google’s free analytics platform. It measures what visitors do after they reach a site: which pages they view, how long they stay and which forms they submit. It replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, and it records every interaction as an event rather than a pageview.
Most GA4 properties lose detailed history without anyone noticing. GA4 keeps event-level data for two months by default, and that’s the data its Explorations reports use. Change it to 14 months under Admin, Data collection and modification, Data retention on the day you set up the property. The standard reports aren’t affected, but any custom analysis older than two months comes back empty.
GA4 compared with Search Console
| Google Search Console | GA4 | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Visibility in Google before the click | Behaviour on your site after the visit |
| Main metrics | Impressions, clicks, average position | Sessions, engagement, key events |
| Traffic sources | Google Search only | Every channel, including AI chatbots |
| Answers the question | Which searches find us? | Do those visitors become leads? |
Seeing AI chatbot traffic in GA4
ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it cites, and Microsoft Copilot adds utm_source=copilot.com. GA4 records those as traffic sources, so you can see visits from AI answers that would otherwise blend into referral or direct traffic. Build a custom channel group for AI assistants that matches sources such as chatgpt, perplexity, copilot, gemini and claude, and report it next to organic search.
Clicks from Google’s own AI features are a different story. Visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode arrive as ordinary google / organic traffic, and GA4 can’t separate them. Google says visitors who click from results pages with AI Overviews spend more time on the site. Check that against engagement on your own organic landing pages rather than taking it on trust.
Set up key events for B2B
Google renamed GA4 conversions to key events in 2024. Mark the actions that signal buying intent: demo requests, contact form submissions, pricing page visits and content downloads. For a specialty paint manufacturer, GA4 key events showed tracked leads up 47.7% from December 2023 to March 2024, the slowest season in its industry. Without key events, GA4 would have reported traffic and nothing about leads.
Where GA4 stops for B2B
GA4 measures the website, and B2B buying mostly happens off it. A buyer can research you in ChatGPT, read your G2 reviews and talk to a colleague before they ever visit, and GA4 sees only the last step. That visit often lands as direct traffic. Connect GA4 key events to your CRM so a lead can be traced to a closed deal, and treat GA4’s attribution reports as a partial view, not the full journey.
Common mistakes
- Leaving event data retention at the two-month default.
- Counting every form fill as a lead, spam included. Check what a key event contains before reporting it.
- Not filtering internal traffic, so your own team’s visits inflate engagement.
- Reporting AI traffic as zero because nobody built a channel group to find it.
- Judging SEO on GA4 sessions alone, without the Search Console data that explains them.
Related terms
Google Search Console · Organic traffic · Lead generation SEO · Zero-click search · AI Mode
