In March 2022, Google announced that it will sunset Universal Analytics (UA) in 2023; however, the sunset date was recently extended from October 2023 to July 2024 for users of the enterprise version, Google Analytics 360. Sunsetting UA means organizations need to start transitioning to its replacement, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), as soon as possible. This guide helps explain core differences between UA and GA4, along with advantages of the new GA4 platform.

In this digital era, users are not tied to a single device. With the rise in popularity of mobile devices, a modern user journey might span between both websites and apps, hence a requirement to track user behavior in a unified way. To overcome this, a GA4 property can contain both app and web data in streams that populate both in one place.