Leveraging Google Analytics 4 for Better Business Decision

Introduction:

Imagine you own a thriving retail brand in Connaught Place, New Delhi, or a fast-scaling e-commerce startup headquartered out of Whitefield, Bengaluru. Every single day, hundreds,  maybe thousands, of people land on your website. But here is the uncomfortable question: do you actually know who they are, where they came from, and why most of them leave without buying anything?

If your honest answer is “not really,” you are in very good company. According to a 2023 NASSCOM report, over 67% of Indian small and medium businesses still rely on intuition rather than data when making key marketing and sales decisions. That is an expensive habit in a market as competitive as India’s.

This is precisely where leveraging Google Analytics 4 becomes a game-changer. GA4 is not simply an updated version of Universal Analytics; it is a fundamentally reimagined platform built for the privacy-first, multi-screen world we live in today. Whether you are running a fintech startup in Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex, a D2C brand out of Pune’s Hinjewadi, or a homegrown fashion label catering to customers in Jaipur and Coimbatore, GA4 gives you the clarity to make decisions backed by real evidence.

In this article, we walk you through seven powerful and practical ways that using Google Analytics 4 for business decisions can transform how you grow, without needing a data science background.

1. Understanding the GA4 Shift: Why the Old Way No Longer Works

Google officially retired Universal Analytics in July 2023. If your team has not fully migrated to and started actively leveraging Google Analytics 4, you are already working with an outdated picture of your business.

The most important change is the move from a session-based model to an event-based model. Universal Analytics counted page views and sessions. GA4 treats every user interaction, a button click, a video play, a scroll, a form fill, as a trackable “event.” This shift gives businesses a far more accurate and nuanced picture of the customer journey.

Consider a travel aggregator based out of Gurugram’s Cyber City. With GA4, they can now trace the exact path a user from Kochi took: arriving via a Google Search ad, reading three destination guides, abandoning a payment form, and eventually completing the booking three days later via a mobile push notification, all stitched together as one unified journey across devices.

Businesses that moved to GA4 within six months of launch reported a 22% improvement in marketing attribution accuracy, according to a 2024 Google Ads benchmark study.

GA4 also integrates natively with Google Ads, BigQuery, and Looker Studio, giving even mid-sized Indian businesses access to enterprise-grade analytics pipelines without the enterprise-level cost.

2. Setting Up GA4 Correctly: Custom Events and Conversion Tracking

One of the most common mistakes Indian businesses make is installing GA4 and never going beyond the default Overview dashboard. The real power of Google Analytics 4 for business decision-making lies in properly configured custom events and conversions.

Here are the events every Indian business should be tracking as a baseline:

• Form fills: on “Contact Us,” “Get a Quote,” or “Book a Demo” pages, marked as conversions.
• WhatsApp button clicks:  a critical touchpoint for Indian SMBs where WhatsApp drives the majority of inbound sales inquiries.
• Scroll depth:, to understand how much of your content users actually consume before leaving.
• Video plays and completion rates: for product explainers or testimonial videos.
• Purchase events with revenue values: for any e-commerce functionality.

Take a real estate developer in Navi Mumbai as an example. By setting up GA4 events to capture brochure downloads, site-visit scheduling clicks, and video walkthroughs, they can calculate the exact cost per quality lead for each of their ad campaigns, and reallocate budget away from channels that generate traffic but no genuine enquiries.

3. Audience Intelligence: Know Your Customer Like Never Before

GA4’s Audience Reports section is one of the most directly actionable tools for leveraging Google Analytics 4 in your day-to-day business decisions. It tells you who is visiting your website,  their age, gender, location, device preference, and interests,  in a single, easy-to-read interface.

For an FMCG brand headquartered in Hyderabad’s HITEC City, this data might reveal that 58% of their web traffic comes from mobile users in Tier-2 cities like Vizag, Warangal, and Nashik, a clear signal to prioritise mobile-first page design and invest in regional language content.

GA4’s advanced Explorations feature takes this further with tools like Funnel Exploration (visualise exactly where users drop off in your checkout process), Path Exploration (see the most common journeys users take through your website), and Segment Overlap (discover which audience segments share behaviours and preferences).

An edtech platform in Chennai used GA4’s Funnel Exploration to discover that 43% of users who started a free trial sign-up dropped off at the mobile number verification step. Fixing that one friction point increased free trial completions by 31% within a month.

4. Predictive Analytics: Let GA4’s AI Work for You

One of the features that most clearly separates GA4 from every analytics tool that came before it is its built-in predictive metrics, powered by machine learning. These activate automatically once your property has sufficient data, and they include Purchase Probability (how likely a user segment is to buy in the next seven days), Churn Probability (which users are at risk of disengaging), and Predicted Revenue (estimated earnings from a user cohort over the next 28 days).

For a SaaS company operating out of Chennai’s Tidel Park, this means they can proactively launch personalised retention campaigns targeting users with high churn probability, before those users actually leave. This is the shift from reactive to predictive, and it fundamentally changes how well a lean team can compete with much larger players.

These predictive audiences can also be exported directly to Google Ads for automated remarketing. A study by McKinsey found that AI-driven personalisation can deliver 5 to 8 times the return on marketing investment, and GA4’s predictive features are a free, built-in gateway to exactly that capability.

5. GA4 and Google Ads: Maximising Every Rupee of Ad Spend

India’s digital advertising market is on track to cross ₹45,000 crore by 2025, according to the Dentsu Digital Report 2024. For the businesses making up that investment, the integration between Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads is arguably the most financially impactful capability available.

By linking GA4 with your Google Ads account, you can import GA4 conversion events to enable smarter automated bidding strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS, build remarketing audiences based on real behavioural signals (for example, users who visited your pricing page twice but never submitted an enquiry), and identify which campaigns are driving high-value customers versus which ones are generating hollow clicks.

Consider a jewellery brand in Surat. By using GA4 to identify that users who view more than four product pages in a session are six times more likely to purchase, they can create a high-intent custom audience and serve them a time-limited offer via Google Ads, dramatically improving ROAS without increasing the overall budget.

6. Cross-Device Tracking: Follow the Full Customer Journey

Indian consumers are among the world’s most multi-device users. A shopper in Kolkata might discover your brand on Instagram Stories on their phone, research reviews on a laptop at work, and complete the purchase on a tablet at home. Universal Analytics struggled to stitch these touchpoints together. Google Analytics 4 is built for exactly this.

GA4’s cross-device and cross-channel tracking uses a combination of User-ID, Google Signals, and privacy-preserving modelled data to deliver a unified view of the customer journey. This matters enormously for accurate marketing attribution.

A health and wellness brand in Ahmedabad discovered through GA4’s data-driven attribution model that paid social was the true first-touch channel, driving 70% of new customer acquisitions,  even though email had been receiving the credit under the old last-click model. That single insight shifted their monthly budget allocation by ₹8 lakh from email to Meta Ads, improving cost per acquisition by 34%.

Without cross-device tracking, businesses routinely over-credit the last channel a customer used before converting, and severely under-credit the channels that first introduced them to the brand. GA4 fixes this.

7. Custom Dashboards and Reporting for Leadership Teams

Data is only valuable when it reaches the people who can act on it. GA4’s custom reports and its seamless connection with Looker Studio allow businesses to build live dashboards that bring together website performance, ad spend, and business KPIs in one place.

A startup founder in Noida’s Sector 62 tech corridor can build a single morning dashboard showing yesterday’s conversions by channel, top landing pages, cost per lead across campaigns, and a 30-day trend line, all updating in real time. This replaces hour-long weekly reporting meetings with a five-minute data review.

For larger organisations, GA4’s granular user roles and property-level access controls mean the marketing team, the product team, and the C-suite can each see exactly the slice of data most relevant to their decisions, without being overwhelmed by noise.

GA4 also supports integration with CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot via BigQuery exports, closing the loop between online behaviour and offline sales outcomes, an important capability for B2B businesses operating out of hubs like Chennai’s Old Mahabalipuram Road or Hyderabad’s Financial District.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. Is Google Analytics 4 free to use for Indian businesses? Yes, GA4 is completely free for the vast majority of businesses. Google offers the full GA4 platform at no cost, including all event tracking, audience building, predictive metrics, and Looker Studio integration. The only paid version is Google Analytics 360, which is designed for large enterprises needing higher data processing limits and formal SLAs. For Indian SMBs and most mid-market companies, the free tier is more than sufficient.

Q2. What is the main difference between GA4 and Universal Analytics? Universal Analytics tracked user behaviour through sessions and page views. Google Analytics 4 uses a flexible, event-based data model where every interaction, a click, a scroll, a video play, is captured as a customisable event. GA4 also provides native cross-device tracking, built-in machine learning for predictive insights, improved privacy controls aligned with India’s DPDP Act 2023, and direct BigQuery integration for raw data access. Universal Analytics was permanently discontinued in July 2023.

Q3. How quickly can a business start seeing useful insights in GA4? Basic metrics, traffic volume, traffic sources, device breakdown, and top pages appear within 24 to 48 hours of installation. Meaningful trend analysis, funnel reports, and conversion data typically require 30 days of history. Predictive metrics such as purchase probability and churn probability require a minimum of 28 days of event data and at least 1,000 returning users before GA4’s machine learning models activate. The sooner you set up GA4 correctly, the sooner your data history begins accumulating.

Q4. Can GA4 track both a website and a mobile app together? Yes, and this is one of GA4’s most powerful advantages. GA4 was specifically designed to unify web and app data within a single property using the Firebase SDK for app tracking. This is particularly valuable for Indian businesses in edtech, fintech, foodtech, and hyperlocal delivery, where users regularly switch between a mobile app and a website. You get a single, coherent view of the customer journey regardless of the channel.

Q5. How does GA4 handle data privacy under India’s DPDP Act 2023? GA4 was built with a privacy-first architecture. Key features include IP anonymisation enabled by default, Google’s Consent Mode v2 for managing cookie consent preferences, data deletion tools for user data upon request, and modelled data to fill measurement gaps when users opt out of tracking. Businesses should still consult a legal professional to ensure full compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, but GA4’s built-in privacy controls provide a strong starting foundation.

Conclusion:

Leveraging Google Analytics 4 is no longer a technical nice-to-have; it is a core business capability for any Indian company that wants to compete intelligently in 2025 and beyond. From understanding who your visitors really are and mapping their full journey across devices, to predicting which customers are most likely to convert or churn, GA4 gives you the tools to make faster, smarter, and more profitable decisions at every level of your organisation. The businesses winning today, from Bengaluru’s Koramangala startup corridor to Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex, are not the ones with the largest budgets, but the ones who understand their customers better than anyone else. Setting up GA4 correctly, defining the right events, and building a data-driven culture are what separate high-growth businesses from those that stagnate. At Ozrit, we specialise in helping Indian businesses unlock the full potential of Google Analytics 4,  from initial implementation and custom event configuration to advanced audience strategy and campaign attribution, so your analytics investment translates directly into measurable revenue growth. Reach out to Ozrit today, and let your data lead the way.