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Every website generates data – who visits it, where they come from, what they do, and where they leave. The question is whether that data works for you or simply piles up. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the free tool from Google that turns raw numbers into concrete business decisions, and by 2026 it is used by over 16.8 million websites worldwide (BuiltWith).
GA4 is not a “newer version” of old Google Analytics. It is a fundamentally different tool with a new data model, a new interface, new metrics, and built-in AI features that did not exist before. If you own a website and have GA4 installed (or have it, but do not know what to do with it), this article is for you.
We will not show you how to become a data analyst. We will show you what you need to know to work out whether your site is working, where your visitors come from, and what can be improved, in plain terms, concrete steps, and practical examples. We will also introduce GA4 Mastery Levels – a 4-level self-assessment model for where your GA4 implementation stands right now and what the next steps for growth are.
What Google Analytics 4 is
Google Analytics 4 is the free analytics platform from Google for measuring traffic and user behaviour on websites and mobile apps. It replaced the previous version, Universal Analytics (UA), in July 2023 and has been the only active version of Google Analytics since then.
The main difference is in the data model. Universal Analytics was built around sessions – groups of actions taken by a user within a set period. GA4 is built around events. Every action – loading a page, clicking a button, scrolling down, submitting a form, a purchase – is a separate event. This sounds like a technical detail, but in practice it means much deeper and more detailed tracking of what people actually do on your site.
GA4 is also a cross-platform tracking tool – it can combine data from a website and a mobile app in one stream, which Universal Analytics could not do. For most Bulgarian businesses the website is the main (or only) channel, but the architecture is ready for expansion.
GA4 Mastery Levels: a framework for self-assessment
Before going into detail, it is useful to work out which level your GA4 implementation is at right now. This framework, which we call GA4 Mastery Levels, rates four levels of maturity. Most Bulgarian businesses are at Level 1, even though they think they are at Level 2 or 3.
| Level | Status | Business effect | How it looks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 – Not Installed | GA4 is not installed | Business runs blindly | No data for decisions |
| 1 – Installed Basic | Only auto events | You have traffic data, not business data | Nobody reviews the reports |
| 2 – Configured Right | Key events + GSC + Consent Mode | You know which channel works | Monthly reviews |
| 3 – Strategic Asset | Custom dashboard + predictive audiences | Decisions are data-driven | Weekly cadence |
Applying the framework: if you are not sure which level you are at, answer these questions. Do you have GA4 installed? Are your key events tracked (contact form, purchase)? Is Google Search Console connected? Do you have Consent Mode V2? Do you review the data at least once a month? Do you have a custom dashboard in Looker Studio? Do you use predictive audiences for remarketing?
The move from Level 1 to Level 2 usually takes 4-8 hours of work and brings immediate benefits – you know not just how much traffic you have, but how much of it actually brings business value. The move from Level 2 to Level 3 is a bigger investment (40-80 hours), but turns GA4 from a reporting tool into a decision-making tool.
Why GA4 is essential for every website
Let us be direct: if you have GA4, you are managing your business blindly. Here is why.
GA4 tells you where your visitors come from. Whether from Google search (organic), from paid ads, from social media, from other sites, or directly (typed URL). This information is critical because it shows which channels work and where efforts are wasted. If 80% of your traffic is from organic search, you know that SEO optimisation works. If social media generates many visitors but none of them convert, you know there is a problem with targeting or the landing page.
GA4 shows you how people use your site. Which pages they visit, how much time they spend, where they click and where they leave. If 70% of visitors leave the page with your services after 5 seconds, you have a problem, and without GA4 you would never work it out.
GA4 measures conversions. A “conversion” is any action that is valuable to your business – submitting a contact form, a purchase, booking an appointment, a call. GA4 tells you how many conversions you have, where they come from, and what the user’s path to them looks like.
GA4 is free. You have no reason not to use it.
Key GA4 concepts explained in plain terms
Before we move to the practical part, let us clarify the concepts you will meet in the interface. GA4 introduced new terminology, and the new metrics can confuse even experienced users.
Events are the foundation of GA4. Every user action is an event. Some are recorded automatically: page_view (page load), scroll (scrolling to 90% of the page), click (click on an outbound link), session_start (start of a session), first_visit (first visit). Others need to be set up manually or through Google Tag Manager, for example form_submit, purchase, phone_call.
Key Events used to be called “conversions”. In 2024 Google renamed “conversions” in GA4 to “key events”, to distinguish them from conversions in Google Ads. In practice this is the same thing – events you have marked as important for your business. When a user submits a contact form and you have marked form_submit as a key event, GA4 counts it as a conversion.
Engaged Sessions is a new metric that did not exist in Universal Analytics. A session is counted as “engaged” if the user stayed for more than 10 seconds, viewed more than 1 page, or triggered a key event. This is a much more informative metric than the plain old “bounce”, because it separates real visits from someone who landed by accident and left immediately.
Engagement Rate is the percentage of engaged sessions out of all sessions. If you have 1,000 sessions and 650 of them are engaged, the rate is 65%. Bounce rate in GA4 is simply the opposite: 100% minus 65% = 35% bounce rate.
Users in GA4 are split into three categories. “Total Users” is the total number of unique visitors for the period. “New Users” are those visiting for the first time. “Active Users” are those who had an engaged session, and this is the metric emphasised in most reports.
Average Engagement Time replaces “average session duration” from Universal Analytics. It measures only the time during which the user was actively interacting with the site (the page is in focus in the browser), not the total session length. The result is more precise, but the numbers are lower than what you are used to.
The main GA4 reports: what each one shows and why it matters
GA4 organises reports into four main categories, which follow the user lifecycle: where they come from -> what they do -> whether they buy -> whether they come back.
Acquisition reports
These reports answer the question “Where do my visitors come from?”. They are split into two subtypes: “User Acquisition” shows how new users first discovered your site, and “Traffic Acquisition” shows where every session comes from, including repeat visits.
Channels include Organic Search (from Google search, related to SEO), Direct (typing the URL directly or from bookmarks), Referral (from a link on another site), Organic Social (from social media without ads), Paid Search (from Google Ads), Paid Social (from paid ads on social media), and Email.
For most businesses the key question is: “Which channel brings me engaged visitors who convert?” Not just traffic, but quality traffic. GA4 shows both.
Engagement reports
These reports answer the question “What do people do on my site?”. The most useful is “Pages and Screens”, which shows which pages are visited most, how much time visitors spend on each, and what the engagement rate is.
The Events report shows all recorded actions, from page_view to form_submit and purchase. And the key events report shows the specific conversions.
If you see that your services page has 2,000 visits a month, but the average engagement time is 8 seconds and the engagement rate is 25%, you know that something is not right – either the content does not match expectations, or the design is pushing visitors away.
Monetisation reports
These reports are relevant for online stores. They show revenue, transactions, average order value, and best-selling products. Enhanced e-commerce tracking adds data for every step of the funnel: product view, add to cart, checkout start, and completed purchase.
Retention reports
These reports show whether users come back. For businesses relying on repeat purchases or subscriptions, retention is just as important as acquisition.
Realtime reports
They show what is happening on your site right now, how many users are active, where they are, and which pages they view. Useful when launching a campaign or publishing new content, to see the immediate effect.
GA4 and AI: predictive metrics and automated insights
One of the most significant evolutions of GA4 in 2026 is the integration of AI and machine learning directly into the platform. This is also the main reason to move from Level 2 to Level 3 in the GA4 Mastery Levels.
Predictive metrics analyse historical data and forecast future behaviour. GA4 can estimate Purchase Probability, how likely a given user is to make a purchase in the next 7 days, and Churn Probability, how likely a user who has been active is to stop returning. These metrics allow building predictive audiences for remarketing, for example you could show a special offer to users with a high purchase probability but low recent activity.
Automated Insights are notifications that GA4 generates when it detects anomalies in the data – an unexpected drop in traffic, a spike in conversions from a given channel, a change in mobile user behaviour. Instead of you digging through data and hunting for problems, GA4 signals them to you.
Google has integrated Gemini AI into GA4, which allows asking questions in natural language, for example “Which channel brought the most conversions last week?” and getting a direct answer with visualisation.
How to set up GA4: step by step
If you do not yet have GA4, or are not sure it is set up correctly, here are the main steps for moving from Level 0 to Level 2 in GA4 Mastery Levels.
The first step is creating a GA4 account and property. Go to analytics.google.com, sign in with your Google account, create a new account (or use an existing one), and create a new property with the name of your site. Choose “Web” as the platform and enter the URL address.
The second step is installing the tracking code. GA4 generates a Measurement ID (starting with “G-“), which needs to be added to your site. If your site is on WordPress, the easiest way is through a plugin, RankMath, Yoast SEO, or a dedicated plugin like GA4 for WordPress. If you use Google Tag Manager (GTM), add the GA4 tag in the container. For sites built by CreateWeb, Google tools setup is included from the very start, GA4, GTM, and Search Console are configured before the site launches.
The third step is configuring data streams. The stream is the connection between your site and the GA4 property. When creating it you can enable Enhanced Measurement, automatic tracking of scroll, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, and file downloads. Recommendation: enable everything.
The fourth step is marking key events. By default GA4 records automatic events (page_view, scroll, session_start, etc.), but does not know which of them matter for your business. Go to Admin -> Events, find the event that matters (for example form_submit), and mark it as a Key Event. If you do not have automatic events for a contact form or purchase, you need to create them manually or through GTM.
The fifth step is connecting Google Search Console. This integration lets you see in GA4 which queries bring your site up in Google, what the CTR is, and what the average position is. Go to Admin -> Product Links -> Search Console Linking. For a more detailed guide to Google tools, read our article on Google tools for business.
The sixth step is configuring Google Consent Mode V2. If your site serves visitors from the EU (and every Bulgarian site does), you need a cookie consent banner and Consent Mode V2, which regulates data collection based on the user’s consent. Without it you risk both a GDPR breach and incomplete data.
After these 6 steps you are at Level 2 of GA4 Mastery Levels. To move to Level 3, add a custom dashboard in Looker Studio with automatic updates, weekly reviews of key metrics, predictive audiences for Google Ads remarketing, and a data-driven attribution model.
What to track: 8 metrics that matter for business
You do not need to track everything in GA4, what matters is tracking the right things. Here are eight metrics every website owner should check at least once a month.
The first metric is Total Users and New Users. It shows whether your site is growing. If new users decline month after month, you have a visibility problem.
The second metric is Traffic Source / Channel. Do you know whether organic traffic is growing? Does paid advertising bring results? Do social media generate real visits? Without this information you cannot allocate your budget wisely.
The third metric is Engagement Rate. Target: above 50%. If it is below 40%, your site probably does not match visitor expectations, either loads too slowly, or the content is not relevant.
The fourth metric is Average Engagement Time. For informational content (blog, articles), target above 1 minute. For service pages (contact, about), even 20-30 seconds may be enough.
The fifth metric is top pages by visits (Pages and Screens). Do you know which is the most visited page on your site? If it is the homepage, good. If it is a blog article, even better, because it means SEO works. If it is the “404 error” page, you have a problem.
The sixth metric is Key Events. How many conversions do you have? From which channel do they come? What is the conversion path? Without tracking key events GA4 is just a count of visits. For a broader perspective across all marketing indicators, we have a dedicated guide to marketing metrics.
The seventh metric is devices (Tech -> Overview). What percentage of your traffic is mobile? If it is above 60% (and for most Bulgarian sites it is), the mobile version of the site matters more than the desktop version.
The eighth metric is geography (Demographics -> Overview). Where are your visitors? If you are targeting the Bulgarian market, but 40% of your traffic is from India, something is not right with your ad targeting or your keywords.
5 common GA4 mistakes we see
After working on dozens of projects, here are the mistakes we encounter most often among Bulgarian businesses.
The first mistake is installing GA4 but without marking key events. GA4 records visits automatically, but without manually configured conversions (contact form, purchase, booking) you do not know whether your site actually delivers results. You have traffic data, but not business value data. This is the classic gap between Level 1 and Level 2 of GA4 Mastery Levels.
The second mistake is double tracking. When the GA4 tag is added both through GTM and directly in the theme code, every visit is counted twice. The result is inflated statistics, you see double the actual visits.
The third mistake is an unconfigured Consent Mode. Without Consent Mode V2 and a cookie banner, GA4 either collects data without consent (a GDPR breach) or does not collect data at all from users who have not given consent (incomplete statistics). Correct configuration allows modelled collection of aggregated data even in the case of refusal.
The fourth mistake is no link to Google Search Console. Without this integration you do not see the key queries that bring visitors to your site from Google. This is free SEO information that requires barely 2 minutes to set up.
The fifth mistake is nobody ever looks at the data. GA4 is installed, but nobody logs in. Data is useless unless it turns into decisions. We recommend a minimum monthly review of the core metrics.
GA4 and CreateWeb: how we configure it for every project
At CreateWeb, Google tools setup is a standard part of every website development project. We do not just install GA4, we configure it correctly from the very start.
Specifically, for every project we configure the GA4 property with Enhanced Measurement, Google Tag Manager as a central hub for all tags, key events tied to the specific business goals (contact form, purchase, booking), integration with Google Search Console, Google Consent Mode V2 with a cookie banner, and basic filters for excluding internal traffic (so you do not skew the data with your own visits).
If the project includes an online store, we also add Enhanced e-commerce tracking, tracking of product_view, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, and purchase events. This means that from day one your GA4 implementation starts at Level 2 of GA4 Mastery Levels, not Level 1.
The goal is that from the day the site launches, you have a full and accurate picture of what is happening on it. For a broader look at site analysis tools, including GA4, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs and others, read our article on the best tools for site analysis.
Explorations: for deeper analysis
Standard reports cover the main needs, but when you want to answer a more specific question, for example “What is the path of users from a blog article to the contact form?”, use Explorations.
Explorations is the section in GA4 for personalised analyses. It offers templates such as “Funnel Exploration” (funnel analysis, see at which step users drop off), “Path Exploration” (user path, what they do step by step), and “Free Form” (free format, build tables or charts with chosen metrics and dimensions).
Explorations is a powerful tool, but requires deeper understanding of the data. For most business owners the standard reports are perfectly sufficient for making informed decisions. Explorations is the next level, for those who want to “dig” deeper, and is characteristic of Level 3 of GA4 Mastery Levels.
GA4 and AI search: what you should know
With the rise of AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) a new question arises: “How do I track traffic from AI sources?” The good news is that GA4 already recognises part of this traffic, visits from AI platforms are tracked as Referral or in a new “AI Search” channel, depending on configuration.
Traffic from AI sources grew by 527% in just one year (Semrush, 2025). This is still a small percentage of overall traffic for most sites, but the trend is clear. Check the “Referral” channel in the acquisition reports and filter by source, to see whether you have visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, or similar.
Frequently asked questions
What is Google Analytics 4 in plain terms?
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a free tool from Google that shows you who visits your site, where they come from, what they do, and whether they take actions that matter to your business (a purchase, a contact form, a booking). It is the successor to Universal Analytics and the only active version since July 2023.
Is GA4 free?
Yes. GA4 is completely free for standard use. There is also a paid version, Google Analytics 360, for large enterprises with huge data volumes, but for 99% of businesses the free version is more than sufficient.
What is the difference between GA4 and old Google Analytics (Universal Analytics)?
The main difference is in the data model. Universal Analytics was session-based, organising data around visits. GA4 is event-based, every action is a separate event. GA4 also offers cross-platform tracking (web + app), predictive metrics with AI, a new “engaged sessions” metric, and built-in support for Consent Mode V2.
How do I check whether GA4 is installed correctly on my site?
Open GA4 (analytics.google.com), select your property, and go to “Realtime” reports. Open your site in another tab. If you see yourself as an active user, GA4 works. For a more thorough check use the Google Tag Assistant extension for Chrome.
What are Key Events and why do they matter?
Key events (formerly “conversions”) are user actions that carry direct business value, submitting a contact form, a purchase, booking an appointment. Without marking key events, GA4 only tells you how many people visited, not how many of them actually did something useful. This is the boundary between Level 1 and Level 2 of GA4 Mastery Levels.
What is “engagement rate” and how does it differ from bounce rate?
The engagement rate shows the percentage of sessions where the user stayed for more than 10 seconds, viewed more than 1 page, or triggered a key event. Bounce rate in GA4 is simply the opposite: 100% minus the engagement rate. If the engagement rate is 65%, the bounce rate is 35%.
How often should I check GA4?
At a minimum, monthly, reviewing the core metrics: users, traffic sources, engagement, key events. During active ad campaigns, weekly. When launching new content, check the Realtime reports on the day of publishing.
Do I need Google Tag Manager, or can I do without it?
You can do without GTM, the GA4 tag can be added directly through a WordPress plugin. But GTM is strongly recommended, because it allows more precise management of all tracking tags (GA4, Google Ads, Meta Pixel) from one place, without touching the site’s code. At CreateWeb we use GTM on every project.
What are GA4 Mastery Levels and which level am I at?
GA4 Mastery Levels is a self-assessment framework with 4 levels: Level 0 (no GA4), Level 1 (basic install), Level 2 (properly configured with key events, GSC, Consent Mode), and Level 3 (strategic asset with a custom dashboard and predictive audiences). Most Bulgarian businesses are at Level 1, even though they think they are further ahead. Moving to Level 2 takes 4-8 hours of work and brings immediate benefits.
Where do I start if I have never used GA4?
Start with the 6-step setup process: create a property, install the tracking code, configure Data Streams with Enhanced Measurement, mark key events, connect Google Search Console, and configure Consent Mode V2. Then check the 8 key metrics at least once a month. This puts you at Level 2 of GA4 Mastery Levels.
Conclusion
Google Analytics 4 is not “nice to have”, it is a core business tool. In a world where every marketing decision needs to be backed by data, GA4 gives you that data for free.
GA4 Mastery Levels from this article gives you a clear roadmap for self-assessment – from Level 0 (no GA4) through Level 1 (basic install) and Level 2 (properly configured) to Level 3 (strategic asset). Moving from one level to the next is generally a matter of discipline and a few hours of work, not a large investment. Most Bulgarian businesses can move from Level 1 to Level 2 in a single working day and gain immediate benefits.
You do not need to be a data analysis expert. It is enough to check the 8 key metrics at least once a month, to have key events set up correctly, and to act on what you see. If a given page has a low engagement rate, improve it. If organic traffic is growing, continue with the SEO strategy. If conversions from paid ads are not paying off, stop and rethink.
At CreateWeb GA4 is set up on every project, from corporate websites to online stores. Because a site without analytics is still a shop with no till, it might work, but you do not know whether it is profitable.
Ready to set up GA4 correctly for your business? Talk to the CreateWeb team for a free consultation, we will apply GA4 Mastery Levels to your current situation and propose a concrete plan for moving to the next level. See our portfolio for real examples.
For related specialised resources: Google tools for business, marketing metrics and KPIs, website analysis tools, SEO explained, SEO web design, Conversion Rate Optimization.
