Google Analytics 4 measures user activity on websites and mobile apps through the Google tag, mobile SDKs or the Measurement Protocol for server-side events. Data is modeled as events rather than sessions, and a single property can combine web and app streams. Reports and explorations are available in the interface, the Data API supports custom dashboards, the Admin API manages accounts and properties, and BigQuery export provides raw event data. Privacy features include cookieless measurement and behavioral and key event modeling.
It suits marketers, product teams and analysts who need traffic, conversion and audience reporting, especially when campaigns run in Google Ads, Search Ads 360 or Display & Video 360. Standard properties are free of charge but have fixed limits, such as 25 event parameters per event, 50 event-scoped custom dimensions, 14 months of maximum data retention, 100 audiences, 30 key events and 1 million events per day for BigQuery daily export.
Analytics 360 raises these limits (for example 50 months of retention, 400 audiences, 125 custom dimensions and billions of daily exported events), adds unsampled results, fresher intraday data, SLAs and enterprise support, and is priced through Google sales with no public rate. Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data in 2023 and 2024, so GA4 is the current version.