Creating a new property

If you are looking to set up the GA4 property yourself, Google's Help Center has a number of guides available to follow with step by step instructions.

At Iconography, we are unable to advise or assist with the setup and management of Google Analytics accounts or Google Tag Manager and any properties within.

Users

One particularly prominent difference is how Google Analytics 4 handles Users.

Both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 report on the number of Users on the site, but that means something very different for each of them; which can lead to confusion.

Read Google's Support Documents

Metric	UA	GA4
Total Users	Primary user Metric Total number of users	Total number of unique users who logged an event
New Users	Number of users who interacted with your site for the first time	Number of users who interacted with your site of launched your app for the first time. The Metric is measured by the number of new, unique, user IDs that logged the "first open" or "first visit" event.
Active Users	N/A	Number of distinct users who visited your website or application. An active user is any user who has an engaged session or when Analytics collects the "first visit" event or "engagement time msec" parameter from a website.

A lot of reporting in UA was based on Total Users and New Users, but you simply can't do the same in GA4. Essentially in the new system, a user is only counted if they accept the cookies prompt and interact with the site in a meaningful way.

With this in mind, it is quite probably that a large proportion of the 'users' being tracked in UA were not actually users, but most likely bots that never pass the Cookie prompt. More on Cookies and their impact on Analytics below.

Cookies

Since the introduction of GDPR regulations in 2018, it is a requirement that users can consent to or decline being tracked via Cookies on a website.

As Universal Analytics predated these changes, GA4 has essentially overhauled how users are handled based on their cookie acceptance.

Bottom line: for users who do not accept cookies, GA4 will not be able to deliver accurate data - especially for metrics like conversions and revenue.

GA4 Updates

Creating a new property