GA4 is a genuinely powerful analytics platform. It can track complex user journeys across web and mobile, model attribution across multiple campaigns, and surface behavioural data that most tools can't match. The problem isn't what it can do. The problem is that almost none of that power is accessible without significant expertise, configuration, and time investment.
For most website owners, marketing teams, and agencies, GA4 presents a poor trade: enormous complexity in exchange for capabilities that are either irrelevant to their needs or buried so deep in the interface that they never get used. Complex tools with excellent interfaces are a pleasure to use. Complex tools with poor interfaces are just complex.
The interface doesn't match the ambition
GA4's report structure was built around a framework designed for enterprise e-commerce and app teams: acquisition, engagement, monetisation, retention. For a typical website, the things you actually want to know are traffic, top pages, referral sources, locations, and devices. In GA4, assembling that picture requires navigating across multiple reports, or building custom Explore queries from scratch.
The Explore section is where GA4's real analytical depth lives: funnels, path analysis, cohort exploration, custom segments. It's powerful. It's also designed for people who understand dimensions, metrics, attribution models, and segment definitions. For anyone without that background, it's an interface that consistently makes you feel like you're doing something wrong.
This isn't a problem that goes away with familiarity. It's a structural issue: GA4 was built to handle an enormous range of use cases, and the interface reflects that scope. The result is a tool where the distance between opening the dashboard and answering a simple question is much longer than it should be.
Metrics defined for the wrong audience
GA4's definitions of core metrics reflect priorities that don't always align with how website owners think about their performance.
Engagement rate, the percentage of sessions where a visitor stayed for at least 10 seconds, viewed two or more pages, or triggered a conversion event, was designed to align with how advertising platforms measure campaign quality. It's a useful metric in that context. For a content site where someone arrives, reads a long article thoroughly, and leaves, a 9-second visit counts as unengaged even if the reader got exactly what they came for.
Sessions, users, and conversions are all calculated through definitions that have changed over time and vary depending on which report you're looking at. The same metric can show different numbers in different parts of the interface, and the explanation is never surfaced in the UI itself. For teams trying to make decisions from this data, that inconsistency erodes trust in the numbers.
The consent gap makes the data less complete
GA4 requires a cookie consent banner for EU visitors and increasingly for visitors in other jurisdictions. That's a legal consequence of how it was built, not a design choice. The practical effect is that a meaningful percentage of visitors, estimates typically run between 20–40% depending on the audience and banner design, decline consent and disappear from your data entirely.
Add ad blocker usage on top of that, around 30% of global internet users, higher among technical audiences, and GA4's reported numbers can be missing a substantial portion of real traffic. Decisions about content, campaigns, and product made from incomplete data are less reliable than they appear.
What analytics should actually look like
The right analytics tool doesn't make you choose between power and usability. It surfaces the depth you need through an interface that makes it accessible to a solo founder, a marketing team, or a large organisation, without requiring specialist knowledge to get value from it.
Palace Analytics was built on that premise. The dashboard answers the questions most teams ask every day, traffic, top pages, referral sources, locations, devices, engagement, without requiring custom reports to find them. Custom event tracking, funnel analysis, user journey visualisation, UTM campaign management, and conversion tracking are all included and accessible without configuration overhead.
For teams running paid campaigns, Palace's built-in UTM manager and conversion tracking covers everything needed to measure and optimise ad performance across Google Ads, paid social, or any other channel, with attribution data sitting alongside your traffic in the same dashboard. No tag manager, no separate campaign reporting tool, no switching between interfaces to assemble a complete picture.
The tracking script is under 1.5KB, around 50× smaller than GA4, cookieless by default, and requires no consent banner. Every visitor is counted. Data is hosted in Europe and never shared with third parties. GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant out of the box.
Palace is building toward the analytical depth that teams of any size need, from a founder checking traffic on their phone to a marketing team running multi-channel campaigns. What exists today already covers what most websites actually use, in an interface that doesn't require a specialist to operate.
Making the switch
Switching is straightforward. Install Palace alongside GA4 for a few weeks, compare the numbers, and export anything from GA4 you want to keep. Then remove the GA4 script. Google Search Console is unaffected. It's a separate product and has nothing to do with which analytics tool you run.
Most teams find Palace's numbers are higher than GA4's for the same period, because cookieless tracking captures visitors that consent refusals and ad blockers were hiding. That's not a discrepancy: it's a more accurate count.
Palace Analytics is powerful analytics that everyone on your team can actually use. Free up to 100,000 events per month, no credit card required. Try it free.