Why Google Analytics 4 is a bad product

You could read over months about people's frustration when using the new Google Analytics 4. Then you could read the posts about new features you thought should be standard from the start.
So is Google Analytics 4 a bad product?
Yes, it is. But for a different reason.
Products are usually built for a specific audience. You could even say the smaller this audience, the easier you can build a well-balanced product.
Building for a broad audience is tough. Ask the Microsoft Word/Excel team about it.
Google tried to build Google Analytics 4 for at least two audiences: Non-analytical users who go into the tool 3-4x a month and pro analysts who want to do deep custom analysis.
This could only go wrong.

[@Objectified]

Having my first real exposure to GA4 tonight, and this is bewilderingly frustrating. The list of WTF moments I've had over the last few hours is so long and varied I wouldn't even know where to begin.

[@timodechau]

The pity is when you know how they did things right with the old GA. I know these old analytics platforms that were around when GA came around, GA in comparison was so good to work with.

[@PokriPoki]

love product case studies. So many product thought leaders just yammer on and on about academic stuff, but never go thru real examples, which is not usful! Thank you for sharing. Please post more such teardowns.

[@timodechau]

Awesome. Will do. Thanks for the feedback.

[@jonathanmcgrinsey3852]

Very good analysis! I am a beginner when it comes to analytics tools myself, and I feel a lot better for not liking GA4 now. ;) I wonder how this could happen, with the knowledge and experience Google has. To make things worse, they put the whole focus on their whacky product themselves by announcing the sunsetting of UA...

[@timodechau]

I guess too many different interests in competition.

[@hansbunt]

As a non GA expert, i found this really informative!

[@timodechau]

Thanks!

[@KimmoHintikka]

As someone coming from Amplitude and now working in RudderStack lack of focus is not nearly the only thing wrong with GA4. Have you tried the APIs? I've been trying to get integration work reliably GA4 for weeks with no luck on stuff that came out of the box with universal analytics....

[@timodechau]

The GA API was always a weak spot. Better try the BigQuery data export.

[@KimmoHintikka]

@@timodechau at least it kinda used to work. I also agree work BQ route but for many that's a second DWH and painful on its own

[@leonardolourencocrespilhoh511]

Hi, Timo. Thanks for sharing your honest impressions. :) At 8:12 you said that you don't trust GA4 as a free data streaming / data collection pipeline. Why don't you trust it? What I can tell is that I see ~4% less page_views in GA4 when comparing with Universal, for sites with dual tagging using the same trigger interaction on GTM. But I kind of don't think you are talking about this kind of trust. Why don't you trust GA4? Thanks!

[@timodechau]

If I go for a data collection pipeline, I have a setup that can work with this form of data (transformation, modeling, validation, monitoring). Based on this assumption I want to control all sources of errors or changes. Then it would be a weird decision to outsource this to a tool that has black boxes in parts of the pipeline. Because I can't control it. One example is the handling of event timestamps in GA4 - See Simo describing it here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pH69kGaAmaeHbZI. If data is important for downstream applications this would not be acceptable for me. But this is not a Google issue - in that case I would also not work with Matomo or Piwik data.

[@opticaldjcartridge]

GA4 sucks!!!!

[@timodechau]

Well, at least it creates plenty of frustration.

[@TasteofTaboo]

to comprehension to word is a bad one. word is always the worst tool possible. ok a one page letter, everything else is pain

[@timodechau]

Maybe - but I know people doing really powerful stuff in Word (writing whole thesis).

[@TasteofTaboo]

@@timodechau me too and this always leads to massive headaches. I mean it mostly starts by problems caused even not by word itself, the simple stuff that most normal people don't know what the differene between a paragraph and a new line is and therefore their whole document is a big pile of ...