GA4 tracks everything as an event — page views, scrolls, clicks, form submissions, purchases — rather than the session-based model of Universal Analytics. The events you care most about are marked as key events. GA4 combines website and app data in one property, uses modeling to fill gaps when cookies or consent limit observation, and offers flexible exploration reports for analyzing customer journeys.
For advertisers, GA4 provides a cross-channel view that individual ad platforms can't: how paid search, social, email, and organic traffic work together. Linking GA4 to Google Ads lets you import key events as conversions, share audiences, and compare platform-reported results against an independent source.
Example
A business marks 'generate_lead' as a key event in GA4, sees which channels drive the most leads, and imports that event into Google Ads as a conversion.
How Sloss Digital uses it
We configure GA4 with clean key events, link it to the ad platforms, and use it as a neutral reference point when platforms disagree about who drove the result.