Conversions - As all conversions are event-based with GA4, you need to use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to set up conversion tracking. An event tag (conversion) could be a submitted application form, contact message, CV upload, registered job vacancy or any other desired action on your website. This is very different from UA, which allowed for multiple types of conversions (called 'goals'), such as pages per session and session duration. With GA4, you can no longer create destination page conversions within Google Analytics itself. However, setting up custom events provides more flexibility and also granularity in what you track. Once the GA4 Event is tracked in Google Analytics, you can mark it as a conversion in the Events settings. This allows you to track every single conversion that occurs on your website.    Advanced reporting - Unlike UA, GA4 doesn’t offer a large number of immediately available reports. This may seem like a downside but many of those reports wouldn’t have been relevant to your recruitment business anyway. Instead, you will have more flexibility in what you track. The customisation of reports does mean more work to begin with, but it allows you to gain greater insights into metrics that directly feed into what you need to know at any given time.   There are some basic reports available (although it may at first be hard to find the metric you want as some reports might have a different layout). These are acquisition reports (where traffic is coming from), engagement reports (insights into user behaviour), and user reports (insights into your website users, including the devices they’re using and their location). Something that’s important to note is that, because of GA4’s move away from session-based measurements, bounce rate no longer exists. Instead, this metric is replaced with ‘engagement rate’. If a ‘session’ lasts longer than 10 seconds, contains more than one page view and contains more than one conversion event, it is counted as an ‘engagement session.’ The engagement rate is calculated as the number of engaged sessions per total number of sessions. This is a far more reliable measurement than bounce rate and is another positive move by Google Analytics.      Once you’re comfortable with the existing reports, head to the ‘Explore’ area where you can create custom reports to extrapolate the data that is most useful for you. This can be tricky to set up, however, so we also recommend using the Google Looker Studio to create an analytics dashboard. This will allow you to gain quick insights into key metrics and conversions from Google Analytics. It is the perfect tool for quickly finding important data metrics and creating easy-to-read reports.    Google Signals - Users today use multiple devices to complete their user journeys, switching between desktop and mobile for example, which was harder to track in UA. GA4 no longer focuses on views, replacing them with data streams. In GA4, a data stream can be a website, an iOS app or an Android app. So whereas the structure of UA was Accounts>Properties>Views (where you had a unique property for each source of data), the structure of GA4 is Account>Property>Data streams, so each property can include one or all three data sources. What this means is that, whereas under UA your app and website would be two distinct properties within a single account, with GA4 a single property contains data for both the app and the website. This change enables cross-device reporting, cross-device re-marketing, and cross-device conversion export to Google Ads.   Link to Google Search Console - Integrating with Google Search Console can help you gain a better understanding of how users interact with your website when they come from organic search. You'll be able to see where each page ranks in the SERPs, what keywords are driving clicks, and how that traffic behaves once it reaches your site. You can find those settings under property name in the ‘admin’ view.    Filter unwanted data - There’s a host of data that is valuable to collect and analyse but some data will only create anomalies in your reports. In GA4 you can exclude data generated by certain IP addresses - useful if, for example, you want to disregard internal traffic from measurement and test traffic generated by developers. To do this, you'll need to create a filter within Google Analytics and specify the IP addresses you'd like to block. Once this is done, any data generated from those IPs will no longer appear in your reports.