What Is GA4 (Google Analytics 4)?
Updated 19 August 2026
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GA4, short for Google Analytics 4, is Google's free tool for measuring what visitors do on your website and app. It records every interaction as an event: a page view, a click, a scroll, a form submission. It is also the only version still running, because its predecessor, Universal Analytics, stopped processing data on 1 July 2023. For a Malaysian business, GA4 answers the question that matters: which marketing actually produces inquiries.
How is GA4 different from Universal Analytics?
The core difference is the unit of measurement: Universal Analytics grouped a visit into a session, while GA4 records each action as its own event. A scroll, a video play, and a form submission are all tracked the same flexible way.
| Old Universal Analytics | Current Google Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Counts activity as | Sessions and page views | Individual events |
| Covers | Website only | Website and app together |
| Status | Retired, no longer collects data | Actively developed |
| Reports revolve around | Traffic volume | Events and conversions |
The event model follows one person across a phone and a laptop more reliably, and it depends less on third-party cookies. It also means old reports did not carry over, which is why the migration required a fresh setup rather than an upgrade in place.
What can GA4 tell you about your website?
GA4 shows where visitors come from, what they do on each page, and which of them complete an action you care about. You can see whether search, social, or ads send the visitors who stay, which pages hold attention, and where people drop off before contacting you.
This is the standard toolkit, and it is everywhere: Google Analytics runs on about 48% of all websites (W3Techs, August 2026). Paired with Search Console, it also helps diagnose problems like a site that stopped showing on Google.
The mistake we see most often is judging a website by its looks. An owner launches a striking redesign, then cannot say whether it produced a single extra inquiry, because nothing was ever measured.
What should a business set up first?
Set up the events that represent money before you study any other report. For most Malaysian SMEs that means a form submission, a WhatsApp click, and a phone-number tap. Marking those as key events is the heart of conversion tracking.
Everything else builds on that base. Ad platforms optimize toward the conversions you feed them, so the setup decides what your budget chases, and it is how you later calculate a return on ad spend worth trusting.
Without it, decisions default to feelings. We have seen owners blame ad targeting for poor results when the numbers, once measured, pointed at the website itself.
Frequently asked questions
Is GA4 free?
Yes. The standard version of GA4 is free with no usage tier that most SMEs will ever hit. Google sells an enterprise version called Analytics 360, but it exists for corporations with extreme data volumes. For a Malaysian business site, the free tier measures everything this article describes at no cost.
Do I need GA4 if I do not run ads?
Yes, arguably more. Without ad-platform dashboards, GA4 is your only view of whether SEO work and referrals bring visitors who act. It shows which pages earn inquiries and which quietly lose readers, so you can improve the site on evidence rather than opinion.
Can GA4 track WhatsApp inquiries?
Yes, up to the click. GA4 can record every tap on your WhatsApp link or button as an event, which tells you which pages start conversations. What happens inside the chat is beyond its reach, so pair the click data with a simple habit of asking new contacts what brought them to you.
Did my old Universal Analytics data disappear?
Effectively, yes. Universal Analytics stopped collecting data in 2023, and Google later removed access to the stored reports. If nobody exported them, those years of history are gone. That loss is the standing argument for keeping GA4 healthy now: analytics only measures forward, never backward.
Does GA4 slow my website down?
Not meaningfully. The tracking script is small and loads without blocking the rest of the page. If your site feels slow, the real cause almost always sits elsewhere, and our guide to why websites load slowly walks through the usual suspects in the order we check them.
What does GA4 mean for my privacy notice?
GA4 collects visitor data, so your privacy notice should say the site uses analytics and why. Malaysia's PDPA expects transparency about what a site collects, which our guide to the PDPA and your website covers in plain terms. This is general information rather than legal advice.
Measure before you judge
Storming Solutions builds websites and runs SEO, AEO, and GEO for Malaysian businesses from Kuala Lumpur. GA4 with proper conversion events is part of how we work: we would rather show a client real numbers than adjectives.
If your analytics was never migrated, or it tracks page views and nothing else, that gap is worth closing before you spend another ringgit on marketing. Ask us to check your setup, and we will tell you what your data can and cannot currently prove.