5 Things People Hate About GA4 (And Why It’s Not Just You)
Look, I get it. You’ve been using Google Analytics for years, and then one day Google forced everyone onto GA4 and suddenly nothing makes sense anymore.
You’re not alone. Reddit threads, forum rants, and analytics articles are full of people absolutely losing it over GA4.
So let’s talk about the five biggest complaints people have about GA4, straight from the trenches of Reddit and real user experiences. Spoiler: most of them are completely valid.
1. The UI is an absolute nightmare
This is the big one. Almost everyone who complains about GA4 starts here, and for good reason.
Remember when you could just log into Universal Analytics and quickly grab the data you needed in like 20 seconds? Yeah, those days are gone. Now it feels like you’re studying for an exam using the wrong textbook.
Here’s what people are struggling with:
- Nothing is where you expect it to be. Want to filter by URL patterns? Good luck finding it. You’ll probably have to set up Audiences in advance, and oh by the way, those can’t be edited once created.
- The dropdown menus are ridiculous. Instead of selecting multiple segments from one list like a normal person, you have to open customization, add a filter, select from a long dropdown, then select again from another dropdown, then finally apply. Every. Single. Time.
- No regex in the search box. You can only search one phrase at a time. For people managing large sites, this is maddening.
- The line charts are broken. They’re not stacked, so seeing trends over time is basically impossible. And they can only show about 10 dimensions, which is useless for anything with high cardinality.
One Redditor put it perfectly: it’s like “trying to fight an octopus” just to extract basic data.
2. You can’t group dates by weeks, months, or years
Wait, what? Yeah, you read that right.
This one blew my mind when I first heard it. In Universal Analytics, you could easily look at conversion rates over weeks or months. It was basic functionality that everyone used. In GA4? Nope. Gone. Poof.
Want to analyze seasonal trends or compare month-over-month performance? You’re going to have a bad time. This isn’t some advanced feature. It’s literally Analytics 101, and GA4 just… doesn’t do it well.
3. Data delays
Remember when you could check your analytics and see what was happening right now? GA4 has other plans.
People are reporting they sometimes have to wait 48 hours for report data to show up. That’s not a typo. Two full days.
Sure, most websites don’t need full data from yesterday for everything, but when you’re trying to troubleshoot a campaign or figure out if that blog post you just published is getting traction, waiting two days is absurd.
4. The confusing data retention limits
Here’s where GA4 gets a bit tricky, and Google doesn’t explain it super clearly.
GA4 has two types of data, and they’re treated differently:
User-level data (stuff tied to individual visitors like demographics, user IDs, event-level details) gets automatically deleted after 14 months by default (or 2 months if you haven’t changed the setting). Once it’s gone, you can’t use it in Explorations or detailed reports anymore.
Aggregated data (like total sessions, pageviews, referral sources) sticks around indefinitely. You can still see overall trends in your standard reports going back to when you first started using GA4.
So what’s the problem? Well, if you want to do any kind of detailed analysis—like tracking how individual user cohorts behaved over time, or analyzing long-term conversion patterns by user segments—you’re limited to 14 months unless you upgrade to GA4 360 (where you can extend it to 50 months).
Compare this to Universal Analytics, which let you keep everything indefinitely. Now you have to either:
- Accept the 14-month limit for detailed analysis
- Manually export data to BigQuery (technical and potentially expensive)
- Pay for GA4 360 (definitely expensive)
The worst part? The default setting is actually 2 months, not 14. So if you didn’t know to change it when you first set up GA4, you’ve been losing detailed data way faster than you thought.
And oh yeah, you can’t import your old Universal Analytics data into GA4 because the data models are completely different. So Google’s advice was to run both UA and GA4 side-by-side, duplicating everything. Which was totally not confusing or resource-intensive at all.
5. Everything requires “Explorations” (and they’re a pain)
Want to do any kind of detailed analysis in GA4? Welcome to Explorations—Google’s way of making you work for your data.
Here’s how it works: First, you have to import the dimensions and metrics you want to use into one column. Then you pull from those into a second column to create your visualization. It’s like Google looked at the simplest possible workflow and said “how can we add more steps?”.
For casual users or small business owners who just want to see which pages are performing well, Explorations are overkill and confusing. And for power users who need to drill down into data quickly, they’re just… slow and clunky.
Plus, building an Exploration requires “soo many clicks” according to frustrated Redditors. When you’re checking dozens of different data points every day, those extra clicks add up fast.
The bottom line
Look, GA4 isn’t going anywhere. Google has made that clear. But that doesn’t mean you have to suffer through the terrible UI, confusing workflows, and missing features.
The good news? Tools exist that sit on top of GA4 and give you back the simplicity and clarity you had with Universal Analytics—without requiring a PhD in Google’s ever-changing terminology.
Because at the end of the day, analytics should help you make decisions faster, not turn into a full-time job just to figure out what happened last week.
Having GA4 headaches? ClarioMetrics turns GA4’s confusing data into clear, simple reports you can actually use. No Explorations required.