This document provides an overview of how the old Universal Analytics (UA) metrics map to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) metrics and which new metrics GA4 introduces compared to UA.

How UA maps to GA4:

UA metric	GA4 metric
ga:pageviews	Page views
ga:uniquePageviews	N/A
ga:buyToDetailRate	Purchase-to-view rate
ga:itemQuantity	Items purchased
ga:revenuePerItem	N/A
ga:itemRevenue	Item revenue
ga:uniquePurchases	N/A
ga:itemsPerPurchase	N/A
ga:productDetailViews	Items viewed
ga:productListCTR	Item list click through rate
ga:productListClicks	Items clicked in list
ga:productListViews	Items viewed in list
ga:cartToDetailRate	Cart-to-view rate
ga:productAddsToCart	N/A

 

ga:uniquePageviews:
Defined by Google as: “Unique pageviews is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. A unique pageview is counted for each page URL + page title combination.”

The unique page views metric has been removed in GA4.

ga:revenuePerItem:
Defined by Google as: “The average revenue per item.”

The metric does not exist in GA4 anymore. However, based on the definition, this could be calculated by dividing item revenue by items purchased.

ga:uniquePurchases:
Defined by Google as: “The number of product sets purchased. For example, if users purchase 2 frisbees and 5 tennis balls from the site, this will be 2.”

This metric also exists in GA4 as ”ecommerce purchases”, but Google doesn’t allow this metric to be retrieved for specific items. This means we cannot support it.

ga:itemsPerPurchase:
Defined by Google as: ” The average quantity of this item (or group of items) sold per purchase.”

This metric does not exist anymore in GA4 and also cannot be calculated ourselves because we cannot retrieve the “ecommerce purchases” metric as mentioned above.

ga:productAddsToCart:
Defined by Google as: “Number of times the product was added to the shopping cart.”

At first glace this metric might look the same as the “Items added to cart” metric we do support for GA4, but it is likely different. The UA metric probably counts the number of times the add-to-cart button was clicked, while the GA4 metric counts the number of items added to the cart. So that might result in GA4 metric being higher in some cases.

New metrics in GA4:

Items added to cart	The number of items that were added to cart.
Items checked out	The number of items that were in the cart during checkout.
Items viewed in promotion	The number of items viewed in a promotion.
Items clicked in promotion	The number of items clicked in a promotion.
Item promotion click through rate	The number of users who selected a promotion(s) divided by the number of users who viewed the same promotion(s).