Key takeaways
- The five things GA4 gets fundamentally wrong about B2B SaaS
- Where GA4 is still useful (and where to cap your investment in it)
- How to migrate sources, mediums, and campaigns into a SaaS-grade model
- How to maintain backwards compatibility for finance and reporting
- A 30-day migration plan you can hand to a marketing ops manager
What GA4 was actually built for
GA4 is an event-based analytics tool optimized for ecommerce, in-session conversions, and short funnels. Its data model assumes a user converts in one or two sessions, that revenue is captured at checkout, and that one cookie equals one buyer.
B2B SaaS breaks every one of those assumptions. Sales cycles run weeks or months. Buying committees have multiple humans on multiple devices. Revenue lives in Stripe and recurs every month. GA4 will tell you something, but it won't tell you the truth.
Five things GA4 gets wrong for B2B SaaS
- It can't see CRM lifecycle stages (MQL, SQL, opportunity)
- It doesn't roll up contacts into accounts
- It loses cross-device journeys without a logged-in user ID
- It doesn't natively understand recurring revenue, expansion, or churn
- It can't dedupe form fills against Stripe purchases
Keep what works
GA4 is still useful for top-of-funnel page-level analytics and SEO content reporting. Keep it for those, and stop trying to make it do attribution.
The 30-day migration plan
Week 1: install Cometly's pixel and server-side tracking. Week 2: connect HubSpot and Stripe and configure the events. Week 3: build the canonical pipeline-by-source dashboard and reconcile against GA4. Week 4: cut over your weekly marketing review to Cometly and archive GA4 for the SEO team.
Cometly · Guide
