You’ve finally had to bite the bullet and upgrade to Google Analytics GA4 from UA (GA3) with the UA switch off from 1st July 2023.

And you’re wondering where on earth unique pageviews are.

Well, don’t drive yourself crazy looking for them. GA4 dropped unique pageviews.

Yes, they were a bedrock metric that you based your KPIs on but they are no longer.

In UA (GA3) Google told us “unique pageview, as seen in the Content Overview report, aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.”

In GA4 Google tells us simply there is no GA4 equivalent of the GA3 (UA) Unique Pageview, helpfully putting a ‘N/A’ in the GA4 column of the UA to GA4 mapping table, without so much as a by your leave.

So what metric do you use to see which pages get the most individuals looking at them?

Well looks like there is a ‘Users’ figure against pages which Google explains is “The number of distinct users who visited your website or app.”

I’ve found this new GA4 ‘users’ metric to show a significantly lower figure than the old UA ‘unique pageviews’ (UPV) figure, which may be because the latter was counting every user session where the page was viewed rather than just the unique users behind those sessions.

Who knows?

You can go to the Explore section on the left hand side of the GA4 menu and hand craft your own report of ‘sessions’ against pages but I found that yielded a figure similar to ‘users’ and markedly lower than the UPV figure I’d recorded for previous months.

Some will tell you there is a way to get those old UPV figures by combining user and session data using BigQuery. Easy huh?!

Erm, no. It’s gotten hard to get a UPV figure. But is that because Google wants you to spend time and money doing your own analysis of the data about your website they go to considerable lengths to collect and present? Or because it’s a dated concept they’d rather you didn’t use anymore?

My simple take is that at the end of the day, Google captures certain information during website page (and now app screen too) interactions and tries to present this to us in digestible, useable and familiar terms – so, for example, a user isn’t really a user in the sense of an individual person, it’s some recorded activity of pages being visited by a browser, storing a cookie on the device hosting it, within a certain amount of time since the last visiting of pages by that same browser.

Now as Google gets better at identifying real life actual users (e.g. through verified sign-ins to your own site, or even Google accounts) you may see an apparent decrease in users of your website, when in reality you are just seeing the consequence of Google Analytics more accurately counting users.

This is the quandary of data quality. Improving our data quality may mean we look like we’re doing worse in terms of the amount of data we’re collecting. So why try harder to improve data quality? I mean never mind the quality, feel the width. Unless that quality can ultimately lead you to better decisions..

Well, musings aside, I’m going with dropping UPV from my metrics in favour of the easier to report on users figure for now – but if you have a better understanding leave a comment and enlighten us all!