Performance

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Also known as: GA4 · Google Analytics

Definition

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's analytics product, which records website and app activity as events such as page views, clicks and form submissions, and reports on users, sessions and the actions an owner marks as key events.

In GWI's Q2 2026 survey, published by DataReportal, 84.1% of UAE internet users aged 16 and over said they had used WhatsApp in the past month, so for many businesses enquiries happen in a chat and not in a form. GA4 measures only what it is set up to see: page views arrive automatically, but a WhatsApp tap, a phone call or a form submission needs its own event, marked as a key event so reports can count it. Without them GA4 shows a busy site with no enquiries.

Read the channel reports with care. A share of visits lands in 'direct' because the source was lost, links shared in WhatsApp often carry no source information, and visits from AI assistants can appear as referrals, so treat any figure for them as a floor. Tag the links you control with UTM parameters, and expect GA4's session counts to differ from Search Console's clicks, since they measure different things.

Set it up so that the business, not the agency, owns the property, add the agency as a user, and link it to Search Console and Google Ads. Google's EU user consent policy names end users in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland, not the UAE, so a site with visitors from those places should consider consent mode.

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