Marketers everywhere complain about Google Analytics 4. They’re not wrong.
GA4 isn’t perfect. It’s clunky. It’s confusing. It doesn’t always line up with what you know is actually happening on your site. Traffic numbers fluctuate. Conversions don’t add up. Ads integrations feel half-baked.
For a tool that’s supposed to be the source of digital truth, GA4 often leaves us frustrated and questioning truth itself.
So why do we still use it?
Because despite its flaws, GA4 still has value, but not in the way most people think.
The Problem with GA4
GA4 has been under fire since it replaced Universal Analytics. Marketers have voiced the same pain points over and over:
Inconsistent Tracking
Conversion tracking, traffic sources, and event counts don’t always align with other tools.
User Experience Nightmares
Basic reports are buried. Familiar metrics like bounce rate have been replaced or renamed. Everything takes longer to set up.
Data Gaps
Ad blockers, cookie consent, and privacy laws mean up to 40% of visitor data may never be captured correctly.
Misattribution
Traffic sources are often wrong or incomplete, leaving you with skewed views of what’s driving results.
As one frustrated analyst put it: “GA4 is less about precision and more about direction. It’s not a perfect measurement tool. It’s a compass.”
What GA4 Is Good For
If GA4 isn’t perfect, what’s the point?
The answer: Trends.
GA4 is best at showing you patterns over time:
- Is your traffic going up or down?
- Are certain campaigns gaining traction?
- Is organic performing better than paid this quarter?
- Which pages tend to drive the most engagement?
- Which events are driving the most conversions?
The data points may not be exact, but the trends are accurate enough to make smart decisions.
You don’t need to know if you had 1,000 visitors or 1,083. You need to know if that number is growing or shrinking, and why.
How to Use GA4 Without Losing Your Mind
Here’s how we recommend approaching GA4:
Focus On Directional Data, Not Absolutes
Don’t obsess over why GA4 says you had 97 conversions when your CRM shows 102. Look at the conversion trend. Consider the bigger picture of your marketing strategy and then look at the broader strokes of behavior in GA4.
Use It for Channel Comparisons
Even if the numbers aren’t exact, GA4 still shows which channels are rising and which are underperforming.
Customize Your Reports
Google presumably created GA4 to offer more versatility for reporting. That’s why the out-of-the-box reports are limited. Set up your own dashboards that track what actually matters to your business.
Layer In Other Tools
Heatmaps, session recorders, CRM data, and ad platform dashboards will often give you more reliable insight than GA4 alone. These days it pays to build out a bigger analytics tech stack.
Treat It As One Piece of the Puzzle
No single analytics tool will ever capture 100% of your traffic in today’s privacy-first, ad-blocker-heavy world.
At Divining Point, we even run what we call a PPC Benchmark to audit GA4’s conversion tracking. Using Google Tag Manager, we set up a secondary tag that fires when a conversion is completed. This gives us a second data point to compare against GA4’s reporting.
In some campaigns, we’ve seen discrepancies of up to 20%, where GA4 misattributes conversions to other sources. By comparing the benchmark against GA4, we get a clearer picture of what’s actually happening and can make better decisions with our ad spend.
Measure the Journey, Not Every Mile
GA4 isn’t perfect. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless.
GA4 won’t tell you every twist and turn of the road, but it will tell you how fast you’re moving. That’s enough to know if you’re gaining ground or falling behind. And that’s enough to make smart, strategic marketing decisions.
At Divining Point, we use GA4 for what it’s good at: spotting trends, uncovering patterns, and guiding strategy. Then we layer in other tools to fill the gaps and validate the insights. Because in marketing, perfect data doesn’t exist. Better decisions do.
Want help making sense of your analytics? Contact us today. Let’s talk about how to cut through the noise and focus on the numbers that actually matter.