When GA4 arrived back in October 2020 (yes, we couldn’t believe it’s been that long either!), it came with some sizeable promises; a slicker dashboard, cross-platform visibility, and a future without cookies. It was intended to redefine marketing analytics for a privacy-first world. However, five years on and many marketing teams are still left asking the same question:

“Why does this feel harder than before?”

The Vision: What GA4 Set Out to Achieve

GA4 was ambitious. It set out to fix what Universal Analytics couldn’t:

• Privacy-first measurement and an end to cookies
• Data unification across web and app platforms
• Event-based tracking providing more detailed interactions
• Predictive insights powered by AI
• Better integration with Google Ads and BigQuery
• A simpler user interface

In theory, exactly what marketers had been waiting for – flexible, future-proof, and smarter by design. Quite simply…progress!

But in practice, the transition from Universal Analytics has been messy.
For many, GA4 didn’t simplify analytics; it rebuilt it from scratch and handed teams a whole new host of challenges and more questions than ever before.

So let’s explore the biggest hurdles, the things we see e-comm businesses struggling with everyday…

Delayed Data Reports

GA4 processing wait time can be up to 72 hours and data reports often lag 24-48 hours behind real behaviour. This delay can cost brands thousands of pounds in paid media, hinder timely decision making and negatively impact campaign optimisation. 
“Real-time reporting” often isn’t real time at all. 

Unassigned Traffic Attribution

The move from Universal’s session-based measurement to GA4’s event-based measurement changed everything. Campaign performance often labelled up incorrectly by GA4. The result being that many conversions are now labelled “unassigned” a word that doesn’t tell marketeers anything.

Usability and Simplicity

GA4’s flexibility comes at a cost to its simplicity. Where Universal Analytics had a clear menu of reports, GA4 demands setup and configuration before you can even start.
Even basic metrics behave differently, and the “Explorations” interface often overwhelms non-analysts.

Historical Data Gaps

Because GA4 and UA use different systems, there is no clean way to bring old data across. Users who didn’t set up GA4 correctly before July 2023 when UA stopped collecting data, will have been left with huge gaps in their historical data. GA4 also has a much shorter retention window (14 months by default), so longer-term trend analysis becomes far more complicated to obtain.

Tag Accuracy

GA4’s quality depends entirely on your tag setup. Across hundreds of sites we audit, we regularly see duplicated tags, inconsistent consent mode setup, and poorly linked domains. This results in slow site speed, inaccurate numbers, inflated “direct” traffic metrics, and lost conversions.

What’s Still Structurally Broken

Even mature GA4 implementations face limits that can’t be fixed, even with an expert setup.

• Opaque modelling – GA4 fills consent gaps with modelled data you can’t audit.
• Limited control – You can’t fully customise logic for attribution, deduplication, or event stitching.
• Data delay – The reporting model simply isn’t built for streaming real-time analytics.
• Vendor lock-in – Your data lives inside Google’s ecosystem, not your own warehouse.

For businesses that need real-time insight, unified data control, or explainable models, GA4 alone isn’t enough.

How Fabric Analytics Helps Teams To Go Beyond GA4

At Fabric, we see this pattern daily.
If your GA4 feels broken it doesn’t mean you have “failed” at GA4 setup – you’ve simply outgrown what a one-size-fits-all analytics layer can do.

Fabric Real-Time was built to fill those gaps. 

Real-Time Event Insights

Fabric Real-Time captures and processes events instantly – no lag time, no waiting for Google’s daily refresh. That means campaign, funnel, or product performance is visible as it happens. If something isn’t performing, you know instantly not two days and thousands of budget-spend later.

Full Data Control

You own your schema, your retention, and your transformation logic.
We can fix attribution rules, redefine sessions, or build consent-aware models without waiting for a vendor update.

Clean Tag Governance

Fabric identifies redundant tags, misfiring triggers, and inconsistent consent behaviour across your GTM containers — helping you repair data quality at the source and importantly keeping your web site speed at its optimum level.

Unified Measurement

Blend GA4 data with CRO, ad platform, and backend events into one stream. We ensure you see the full customer journey, not just what GA4 can observe.

Trustworthy and Auditable

All data collection in Fabric Real-Time is explainable and assigned – so marketers can trust what they see, and compliance teams can verify it.

The Takeaway

GA4 isn’t a failure – it’s a reminder that analytics can’t be solely outsourced to a black box.
It handles the basics well: free reporting, simple tagging, and Google Ads integration.
But for any business that depends on speed, accuracy, or control, GA4 alone is no longer enough.

The future of analytics isn’t “GA4 or nothing.”
It’s GA4 plus a data layer you control – one that lets you capture clean, real-time data, model it your way, and trust every number before it hits a dashboard.

It’s Fabric Real-Time.