Opening Google Analytics 4 and understanding nothing is more common than a rainy Monday in Bogotá. You look at the screen, see charts moving and numbers going up and down, and the only certainty you have is that you don’t know whether your business is doing better or worse than last week.
And you aren’t alone: many SMEs have Google Analytics installed, but only a few use it to make real decisions. In other words, a large share of Colombian companies are sitting on a goldmine of data they don’t know how to read.
The problem isn’t yours. Google decided to retire Universal Analytics (the version everyone knew) and replace it with GA4, a tool that completely changed the logic: it went from measuring sessions to measuring events. What used to be “the user arrived, viewed 3 pages and left” is now a stream of interactions you can customize however you like. More powerful, yes. More confusing, too.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most Colombian companies are measuring the wrong metrics. They chase numbers nobody cares about — except whoever prepares the monthly report — while ignoring the data that really tells you whether your digital business is working or not.
By the end of this article you’ll know exactly what to measure, what to ignore and how to stop feeling that GA4 is a white elephant that only eats up your time. No smoke, no guru theory, nothing you can’t apply tomorrow.
The problem isn’t the tool: it’s what you’re measuring
Google Analytics 4 isn’t difficult because it’s a bad tool. It’s difficult because Google changed the logic without asking us. For 15 years we were taught to think in terms of sessions, pageviews and bounce rate. We got used to that. At the end of the month, the community manager or the agency would send a PDF with a little green number and an arrow pointing up, and everyone was happy.
GA4 blew up that model. Now everything is an event. A click, a scroll, a video play, a purchase, a form submission. Every interaction is a signal that you decide whether to measure or not. That means GA4 is only as good or as bad as the mind that configures it.
And here’s the fact that should worry you: most Colombian companies installed GA4 out of obligation — because Universal Analytics stopped working — pasted the code their developer or WordPress plugin gave them, and never touched anything again. Zero custom events, zero key events configured, zero segments. Just the default measurement Google decides to give you… which isn’t designed for your business.
What ends up happening is a toxic loop:
- You open GA4 once a month (if you’re lucky).
- You look at the default metrics.
- You don’t understand what they mean for your revenue.
- You close the tab feeling that “this is useless”.
- You repeat it the next month.
Meanwhile, your competitors — the ones who did set up key events, linked Google Ads and built a dashboard in Looker Studio — are making decisions based on real data. And every month that goes by, the gap widens.
The cost of measuring badly isn’t neutral. It’s expensive. Every peso you invest in paid media without knowing which channel converts, every campaign you repeat “because we’ve always done it”, every website redesign based on hunches instead of data, is money you’re leaving on the table.
5 metrics you should stop looking at (and why your business doesn’t care about them)
There are metrics we’ve been looking at for years because “we’ve always looked at them”. Some were useful in Universal Analytics but lost their meaning in GA4. Others were never useful, and we keep dragging them along out of inertia. Here are the top 5:
1. Total sessions
A session in GA4 isn’t what it used to be. GA4 counts sessions differently from Universal Analytics, so the number can grow or shrink in ways that don’t always reflect reality.
But beyond the technicalities, the underlying problem is different: a session doesn’t pay your payroll. Your website getting 10,000 sessions this month sounds nice in the report, but if none of those sessions ends in a lead, a call or a sale, what good does it do you?
Worse still: high session counts can be hiding junk traffic. Bots, accidental clicks from social media, 2-second visits that Google records as a “session”. Chasing that number is like measuring the success of your physical store by counting how many people walked past on the sidewalk outside.
2. Bounce rate
This is my favorite because it’s the most misunderstood metric. In Universal Analytics, a bounce was “the user saw a single page and left”. In GA4, bounce rate is calculated completely differently: it’s the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. A session counts as engaged if it lasts more than 10 seconds, includes a key event or includes two or more page or screen views.
The problem? If you haven’t configured your key events, or if your site sends the measurement tag incorrectly, the bounce rate can look worse (or better) than reality, and you’ll draw the wrong conclusions about your content.
A high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean your content is bad. Before reading it, make sure GA4 is measuring engagement and key events correctly. Until then, it’s mostly noise.
3. Total pageviews
Another metric that inflates egos but not results. The same user reloading a page 5 times or moving between tabs generates pageviews that mean nothing. And on a single-page site (a product landing page, a quote form), pageviews are simply irrelevant: what matters is whether the user reached the end and converted.
Besides, GA4 prioritizes events over pageviews. If you’re looking at total pageviews, you’re looking at the new tool through the eyes of the old one. It’s like buying a smartphone and only using it to make calls.
4. Average time on page
In GA4, time is measured as engagement time: the time the page is in the foreground of the user’s browser. That’s more accurate than the old metric, but it still doesn’t tell you whether the person understood your offer or was about to buy. A user can leave a page open while answering an email, and another can read your whole article quickly and convert.
That’s why time on its own is a weak signal: your best articles can show modest times, while a page with an autoplay video nobody really watched can show high ones.
A better substitute metric: scroll depth (how far down the page the user went) and interaction events such as clicks on CTAs, internal links or video plays.
5. Total users (without context)
GA4 shows you “users”, and it feels like the most important number on the dashboard. But “total users” without a breakdown is an empty number. How many are new vs. returning? How many arrive through organic search, and how many through a display campaign you’ve already paid for? How many of those users are in Colombia — your real market — and how many are international traffic that will never buy from you?
Besides, GA4 estimates users using cookies and Google signals. If the same user visits you from their phone in the morning and from their computer at the office, GA4 may count them as two. If they use cookie blockers or private browsing, it may count them as a new user each time. The number is an approximation, not a census.
What you need isn’t to know how many users visited you, but how many of them did something that brings your business closer to a close.
5 metrics that really move the needle for your business
We’ve cleared the ground. Now let’s talk about the numbers that will tell you whether your digital presence is generating money or just consuming resources.
1. Key events (conversions)
This is the first thing you should set up as soon as you install GA4, and the thing almost nobody does. A key event (what GA4 used to call a “conversion”) is an action that is worth money to your business: a contact form submitted, a click on the WhatsApp button, a completed purchase, a newsletter subscription, a catalog download.
GA4 lets you mark any event as a key event. You don’t need a thousand events: 5 to 8 well-defined ones are enough for most Colombian SMEs. What’s essential is that each key event has a direct connection to your sales process.
A concrete example: if you have an ecommerce store, your key events are add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase. If you offer B2B services, your key events might be contact_form, whatsapp_click and portfolio_download. If you run a real estate agency, property_enquiry and book_visit.
Once you have active key events, everything in GA4 starts to make sense: you can see which channel brings the most conversions (not the most traffic), which landing page converts best and how much each lead or sale is costing you.
2. Sources that convert (not the ones that bring traffic)
GA4’s traffic acquisition report is useful, but insufficient if you stop there. The question isn’t “where do people come from?”, but “where do the people who buy come from?”.
Cross your traffic sources with your key events and you’ll find surprises: that Instagram channel you thought was useless might be generating 40% of your leads. That Google Ads campaign you were proud of for its impressions might have a CPA (cost per acquisition) that loses you money with every click.
In GA4, go to Explore > Free form and build an analysis that compares sessions vs. key events by source/medium. Within seconds you’ll see which channels are working for you and which are pure noise.
3. Landing pages with the best conversion rate
Your homepage probably gets more traffic than any other page. But it’s almost certainly not the one that converts best. Pages that convert well tend to be more specific: a service landing page, a blog article with a lead magnet at the end, a “thank you for contacting us” page that leads to an offer.
GA4 lets you see, for each landing page, how many sessions started there and how many of those sessions ended in a key event. The formula is simple: (sessions with a key event / total sessions on that page) × 100.
Once you identify which pages have the best conversion rate, you can do two things immediately: (1) send more paid traffic to those pages — because you already know they convert — and (2) apply what worked on those pages to the rest of the site.
4. Value per user (estimated revenue)
GA4 has a field almost nobody uses that’s pure gold: average value per user. If you have an ecommerce store with purchase tracking properly configured, this metric appears automatically. If you don’t sell online, you can estimate it by assigning a monetary value to each key event.
Example: if you know that for every 10 contact forms you close 1 client worth COP 3,000,000, each form submitted is worth COP 300,000 in estimated revenue. Set that value in GA4, and suddenly every click, every campaign and every channel has a peso figure attached to it.
This completely changes the conversation with your team or your boss. You go from “we had 5,000 visits this month” (which nobody cares about) to “we generated COP 45,000,000 in measurable pipeline this month” (which does matter).
5. Conversion rate by channel (with investment context)
Not all channels cost the same. Organic traffic from Google is “free” (in money, not in time or effort), but paid media on Meta or Google Ads has a measurable direct cost. What you need is a table that tells you, for each channel:
- How much traffic it brought
- How many key events it generated
- What that channel’s conversion rate was
- How much you invested in that channel (if applicable)
- How much each conversion cost you (CPA)
With those 5 data points, deciding becomes easy. If channel A costs you COP 50,000 per conversion and channel B costs you COP 12,000, you move budget from A to B. No drama, no hunches. Pure business math.
How to set up GA4 to measure what matters (without going crazy)
Setting up GA4 properly doesn’t require a postgraduate degree or a 5-person data team. With the basics done right, you’re already ahead of most companies that have the tool installed and abandoned. If you also complement GA4 with an SEO service that connects your search data, you have the complete combo: you know what traffic arrives, where it comes from and how much it converts. Here, step by step, is the bare minimum:
Step 1: Create the property correctly
If your GA4 property was created automatically from Universal Analytics with Google’s setup assistant, it probably carries over settings you don’t need. My recommendation: review it carefully or start with a clean GA4 property. Universal Analytics data is no longer available, so there’s nothing to lose by doing the configuration properly from scratch.
When you create the property, review Google Signals (for demographic data and remarketing, in line with your privacy policy) and set the currency to COP (Colombian pesos). It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen dozens of Colombian accounts with the currency set to dollars.
Step 2: Install the tag correctly
You have two options:
- Google Tag Manager (recommended): you create a Google tag for GA4, fire it on all pages and you’re done. GTM then lets you add events without touching code.
- Direct code (gtag.js): you paste the snippet into your site’s
<head>. It works, but every time you want to add an event you need to get into the code.
If you use WordPress, plugins such as Site Kit by Google or MonsterInsights handle the installation in a few clicks. If your website is custom-built or on another platform, 15 minutes with a developer will sort this out.
Step 3: Exclude internal traffic (MANDATORY)
If you and your team visit the website 20 times a day to check things, test forms or see how something looks, GA4 is counting all those visits as real traffic. Your metrics are inflated with your own activity.
In Admin > Data streams > your website > Configure tag settings > Define internal traffic, create a rule that excludes your office IP address, and then activate the internal traffic filter. If you work remotely with a dynamic IP, you can use Google’s official Analytics opt-out browser add-on when you browse your own site.
This setting takes 2 minutes and is probably the simplest, highest-impact correction you can make today.
Step 4: Set up your key events
I mentioned it above, but I’ll repeat it because it’s the step where most companies fall short:
- Define between 5 and 8 actions that mean money or real purchase intent for your business.
- Create those events in GA4 or in GTM (a click on the WhatsApp button, a form submission, a purchase, a registration, a catalog download, a phone call from the site).
- Mark each one as a key event.
If you don’t know how to create a specific event, the official Google Analytics 4 documentation on key events has guides for the most common cases. Or better still: ask a specialist to set it up for you. The return on that investment is immediate: knowing what works and what doesn’t instead of guessing.
Step 5: Link GA4 with Google Ads and Search Console
This step is free, takes 5 minutes and has a direct impact on your business. When Google Ads receives the right key events from GA4, it can optimize toward what really matters to you instead of optimizing for clicks.
Go to Admin > Product links and connect:
- Google Ads: to share audiences and key events between platforms.
- Search Console: to see which search terms bring organic traffic to your site.
With these two links active, you stop operating blind in both paid media and SEO.
Google Ads + Search Console + Looker Studio: the command center you’ll actually understand
GA4 is only one piece of the dashboard. The real power appears when you connect Google’s three free tools and visualize them in one place:
- GA4: tells you what users do on your site.
- Google Ads: tells you how much you paid to bring them in and which ones converted.
- Search Console: tells you what they searched for on Google to find you.
The problem with GA4 is that its interface is designed for analysts, not business owners. The standard reports are slow and confusing and force you to make 15 clicks to reach the data you need. The solution: Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio).
Looker Studio is a free Google tool that connects directly to GA4, Google Ads and Search Console. It lets you build a custom dashboard — a single screen — with exactly the numbers that matter to your business, without distractions, endless menus or filler metrics.
What I build for Gulupa Digital clients usually has this structure:
- At the top, in large type: total key events for the month, average CPA, estimated revenue.
- In the middle, on the left: a table of traffic sources with their respective conversion rate and CPA.
- In the middle, on the right: landing pages sorted by conversion rate.
- At the bottom: the weekly trend of key events (to spot drops or spikes quickly).
You open that dashboard on Monday morning, look at it for 3 minutes and already know how the month is going. No 40-page reports nobody reads, no 2-hour meetings to interpret numbers. Data → decision → action. As simple as that.
And if you’re already investing in paid media, the GA4 + Google Ads connection transforms campaign optimization: from “let’s try it and see what happens” to “let’s move budget from this campaign with a CPA of COP 85,000 to this other one with a CPA of COP 23,000”. That isn’t analytics. That’s management.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need GA4 if I already have the Meta (Facebook/Instagram) pixel installed?
Yes, and they aren’t redundant. The Meta pixel only measures what happens within Meta’s ecosystem: who arrived from a Facebook or Instagram ad and what they did on your site. GA4 measures all traffic — organic, direct, referral, email, other paid media — and also integrates with Google Ads and Search Console. Having both lets you compare channels and decide where to invest with real data, not with what you “feel” works better.
How much does it cost to implement a properly configured GA4?
GA4 as a platform is free. What may cost money is the initial setup if you hire a specialist. A properly done basic implementation (property, tag, 5–8 key events, internal traffic exclusion, links with Ads and Search Console) takes between 3 and 6 hours of technical work. In Colombian pesos, that service usually costs between COP 600,000 and COP 1,500,000, depending on the complexity of your site and the number of events to configure. Compared with the cost of making blind decisions, it’s probably one of the highest-return investments you can make.
Can I keep using Universal Analytics?
No. Standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data in July 2023, and Google removed access to Universal Analytics and its data in 2024. The only version that receives and processes data today is GA4. Migrating isn’t optional; it’s a requirement if you want to keep measuring anything.
What’s the difference between GA4, the Google Ads tag and Google Tag Manager?
They’re three different tools that work together:
- Google Tag Manager is the “messenger”: you install a single piece of code on your site, and from GTM you fire tags for GA4, the Meta pixel, Google Ads, Hotjar and any other tool without touching the code each time.
- GA4 is the “analyst”: it receives browsing data, processes it and shows you reports on user behavior.
- Google Ads is the “salesperson”: it uses the conversion data GA4 sends it to optimize your campaigns toward real results. All three need each other, but each serves a different function.
Is GA4 worth it if my company only sells via WhatsApp and doesn’t have ecommerce?
Absolutely, and in fact it’s one of the cases where it works best if you configure it properly. You can create a key event that fires every time someone clicks your WhatsApp button on the site, and another when they tap the phone number to call. Then, in GA4, you see exactly where those clicks come from: an Instagram post? Google? A blog article? That information lets you double down on what works and cut what doesn’t. Even if you don’t close sales on the site, GA4 shows you the path your customer took before writing to you.
If your company already invests in paid media, content or a digital presence and you still aren’t clear about what’s working and what isn’t, the problem isn’t the market or the competition: it’s that you’re flying without an instrument panel. For more on the fundamentals, see the importance of GA4 in measuring and optimizing advertising strategies.
At Gulupa Digital we build digital marketing strategies where every peso invested is traceable — because we connect GA4, Google Ads, Search Console and Looker Studio so you can see, in real time and without jargon, which channel is generating customers and which one is just spending your money.
See how our digital marketing service in Medellín works and start measuring what matters →
