How to Switch from GA4 to Clickport Analytics
If you're reading this, you've probably already decided that GA4 isn't working for you. Maybe the interface takes too many clicks. Maybe consent banners are eating your data. Maybe you just want to see your traffic without a 48-hour delay.
Whatever the reason, this guide is the practical part. No stats about why GA4 is broken (I wrote that in the honest comparison). This is the how: set up Clickport, find your data, run both tools side by side, and remove GA4 when you're ready.
GA4 and Clickport approach analytics differently
Before you start comparing numbers, it helps to understand why the two tools will never show identical data. They measure different things in different ways.
GA4 uses an event-based model with cookies. It identifies returning users via a client ID stored in a first-party cookie, then stitches sessions together across visits. It requires consent in the EU (and may not even be legal in several countries), which means a chunk of visitors are never tracked at all. It processes data through machine learning models and can take 24-48 hours to finalize numbers.
Clickport uses a session-based model without cookies. Each visit is independent. There's no persistent identifier linking Tuesday's visit to Thursday's. Instead of user-level tracking, you get complete session-level data for every visitor, with no consent banner required.
The numbers won't match exactly. That's expected. If you run both tools during a parallel test (covered later in this article), expect Clickport to show 10-40% more visitors depending on how much traffic your consent banner was blocking.
Getting up and running
The full setup takes about 15 minutes. No Tag Manager, no consent mode configuration, no event schema to define.
Step 1: Create your account
Go to clickport.io/register and create an account. You'll add your first site during onboarding: enter your domain, pick a timezone, and you're in. (For a visual walkthrough of what to expect, see the Your First Dashboard guide.)
Step 2: Add the tracking script
Clickport gives you a single script tag to add to your site's <head>:
<script defer data-domain="yoursite.com"
src="https://clickport.io/tracker.js"></script>
That's it. One line. The script is under 2 KB (compressed), runs asynchronously, and doesn't set any cookies. For advanced options like hash-based routing or excluded paths, see the script configuration docs.
If you use WordPress, Shopify, or another CMS, paste this into your theme's header area. For WordPress specifically, you can use the header/footer plugin method or add it directly to your theme's header.php. For Shopify, see the Shopify analytics guide. For SPAs (React, Vue, Next.js), see the SPA tracking guide.
Step 3: Verify data is flowing
Open your site in a browser. Then open your Clickport dashboard. You should see yourself as an active visitor in real time within seconds. If you don't, check the troubleshooting guide.
Keep your GA4 script in place for now. You'll run both tools during a parallel testing period before removing GA4.
Traffic and engagement overview
In GA4, your traffic overview is spread across Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition, Reports > Engagement, and various other sidebar sections. Finding a simple "how many visitors did I get this week" answer can involve multiple clicks and report configurations.
In Clickport, everything is on one dashboard.
The top of the dashboard shows your KPIs: visitors, visits, pageviews, bounce rate, average visit duration, and engagement score. Each KPI shows the current value and a comparison percentage against the previous period. Clickport uses weekday-aware comparisons: it compares this Monday to the average of the previous four Mondays, not to Sunday. This eliminates the noise from natural weekday/weekend traffic swings that make GA4's simple period-over-period comparisons misleading.
Below the KPIs, a time-series chart shows your traffic trend for the selected date range. You can pick any range from Today to the last 12 months, or set a custom range.
Metrics mapping:
- GA4 "Users" = Clickport "Visitors" (unique visitors in the period). See the full metrics glossary for definitions.
- GA4 "Sessions" = Clickport "Visits"
- GA4 "Views" = Clickport "Pageviews"
- GA4 "Bounce rate" = Clickport "Bounce rate" (but defined differently. GA4 considers a non-bounce any session with an "engaged session." Clickport requires at least two of: multiple pageviews, a click event, 25%+ scroll, or 15+ seconds on page.)
- GA4 "Average engagement time" = Clickport "Avg. visit duration"
- GA4 has no equivalent = Clickport "Engagement score" (a 0-100 composite score based on scroll depth, time, clicks, and pages viewed)
Sources, campaigns, and UTM tracking
Traffic sources
In GA4, traffic sources live under Acquisition > Traffic acquisition, with a separate User acquisition report and a Channels tab that requires configuration.
In Clickport, click the Sources panel on your dashboard. You'll see all referral sources ranked by visitors. Click any source to filter the entire dashboard by that source: all KPIs, pages, countries, and other panels update to show only traffic from that source.
Clickport automatically classifies traffic into 16 channels, including Organic Search, Paid Search, Social, Email, Referral, Direct, and AI Search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini). GA4 added AI search attribution only recently. Clickport has tracked it since launch.
Campaign tracking with UTM parameters
Your existing UTM-tagged URLs work with Clickport without any changes. If your campaigns already use utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, and utm_term, Clickport picks them up automatically.
Click the Campaigns panel to see all your UTM campaigns. Click any campaign to filter the dashboard by it.
https://yoursite.com/landing?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale
This URL works identically in both GA4 and Clickport. No changes needed.
Google Ads tracking
This is the question everyone asks: can you track Google Ads without GA4?
Yes. Google Ads has its own standalone conversion tracking that doesn't depend on GA4 at all. You have two options:
Option A: Google Ads conversion tag. In your Google Ads account, go to Goals > Conversions > New conversion action > Website. Google gives you a conversion tag to place on your thank-you page. This tracks conversions directly in Google Ads, independent of any analytics tool.
Option B: GCLID tracking. When someone clicks your ad, Google appends a gclid parameter to the URL. Clickport preserves this parameter in its campaign tracking. You can see Google Ads traffic in your Sources panel under "Paid Search" and in your Campaigns panel filtered by the campaign UTM.
You lose GA4's audience-sharing feature (pushing analytics audiences into Google Ads for retargeting). But Google Ads has its own remarketing tag and Customer Match lists that work independently. For most businesses, this covers what you need. The honest comparison covers this trade-off in detail.
Goals, conversions, and custom events
In GA4, you mark events as "Key events" (formerly "conversions"). Setting up anything beyond the default events requires Google Tag Manager, custom event parameters, and sometimes data layer configuration.
In Clickport, conversions are called Goals. You create them in Settings > Goals. There are four types:
Pageview goals
Track when someone visits a specific page. Enter a URL condition like "URL contains /thank-you" or "URL equals /pricing." No code changes needed.
GA4 equivalent: Create a custom event in GTM that fires on a specific page, then mark it as a Key event.
Click goals
Track when someone clicks an outbound link matching a condition. For example: "Click URL contains stripe.com/checkout."
GA4 equivalent: Enhanced measurement tracks outbound clicks, but you can't set conditions on them without GTM.
Form submission goals
Clickport automatically detects form submissions on your site. You can create a goal that matches specific forms by URL or form action.
GA4 equivalent: Enhanced measurement has basic form tracking, but it's unreliable. Most GA4 setups use GTM with custom triggers. (I wrote a detailed guide on form tracking without GA4.)
Custom event goals
For anything else, use the JavaScript API:
clickport.track('Signup', { plan: 'pro' }, { revenue: 29.00, currency: 'USD' });
This sends a custom event with properties and optional revenue data. Create a matching goal in Settings > Goals to track conversion rates.
GA4 equivalent: gtag('event', 'sign_up', { method: 'email' }) or a GTM custom event tag. GA4 requires you to register custom dimensions in the admin panel before they appear in reports. Clickport doesn't. Properties appear automatically.
For full setup details, see the Goals documentation and Custom Events documentation.
Pages, outbound links, and downloads
Pages panel
In GA4, finding your top pages requires navigating to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens, then changing the primary dimension from "Page title" to "Page path" (which isn't the default for some reason).
In Clickport, click the Pages panel. You'll see every page ranked by visitors, with pageviews, bounce rate, average time on page, and engagement score. Entry pages and exit pages are in separate sub-tabs.
Click any page to filter the entire dashboard. Now your KPIs, sources, countries, and everything else show data only for that page. This cross-filtering works across every panel. Click a source, then a page, and you're looking at "visitors from Google who landed on /pricing." GA4 can do this through Explorations, but it takes several minutes to configure each time.
Outbound link tracking
GA4's enhanced measurement tracks outbound clicks, but the data lands in an "events" report that requires filtering by event name. In Clickport, the Outbound panel shows every external link your visitors clicked, ranked by click count. No configuration needed.
File downloads
Clickport automatically tracks clicks on links to common file types (.pdf, .zip, .xlsx, .docx, .csv, and more). These appear as events and can be used as goal conditions.
404 detection
Clickport automatically detects pages that return a 404 status and logs them. You can see which broken URLs visitors are hitting and where they came from. GA4 requires a custom event and GTM trigger to track 404s.
Search terms
If your site has an internal search (using a ?q= or ?s= parameter), Clickport captures those search terms automatically. In GA4, you have to configure the "view_search_results" event and specify your query parameter in the data stream settings.
Audience: countries, devices, and browsers
Countries panel
In GA4: Reports > User > Demographics > Demographic details, then change the dimension to "Country." In Clickport: click the Countries panel. Done.
Click any country to drill down into regions, then cities. The map view shows a choropleth visualization of visitor distribution. All of this filters the rest of the dashboard, just like every other panel.
Technology panel
GA4 splits device data across Reports > Tech > Tech details (browsers) and a separate overview for device categories.
Clickport combines everything in the Technology panel with sub-tabs for: Browsers, Operating Systems, and Screen Sizes. Click any row to filter.
Engagement: scroll depth, time on page, and copy detection
This is where Clickport tracks things GA4 either can't do or requires manual setup for.
Scroll depth
Clickport tracks how far visitors scroll on every page, automatically. The Sessions panel shows per-session scroll depth, and the engagement score factors it in. (For a deeper dive into why engagement metrics matter more than pageviews, see Beyond Pageviews.)
GA4 comparison: GA4's built-in scroll tracking only fires at 90% scroll depth. That's it. One threshold. To get granular scroll data (25%, 50%, 75%), you need a custom GTM trigger with a scroll depth variable.
Time on page
Clickport measures active time on page using visibility detection. If a visitor switches to another tab, the timer pauses. This gives you accurate engaged time, not just "time between pageviews" (which is what most tools actually measure).
Copy detection
Clickport detects when visitors select and copy text on your pages. This tells you what content people find valuable enough to save. No other mainstream analytics tool tracks this.
Form field tracking
Beyond basic form submission detection, Clickport tracks which form fields visitors interact with. You can see if people start filling out a form but abandon it at a specific field.
Real-time and reporting
Real-time view
GA4 has a real-time report that shows the last 30 minutes of activity. Clickport's works the same way: a 30-minute rolling window with auto-refresh every 30 seconds. The difference is that Clickport's real-time data is filterable. Click any source, page, or country in real time and the rest of the dashboard updates. Learn more about how Clickport works.
PDF and CSV reports
GA4 doesn't have built-in PDF export. To share a report with a client, you need Looker Studio or a screenshot. Clickport generates a 3-page PDF report with one click: KPI summary, traffic trends, top sources, top pages, and geographic breakdown. There's also a CSV export that downloads a ZIP file with 10+ CSV files covering every panel. If you manage client sites, the 60-second client report guide shows how to use this in practice.
Annotations
You can add annotations to any date on the Clickport dashboard to mark events like launches, campaigns, or site changes. GA4 removed annotations when they sunset Universal Analytics and never brought them back (it's been three years).
Running both tools side by side
Don't remove GA4 on day one. Run both scripts in parallel for 2-4 weeks. Here's what to look at:
What to compare
- Visitor counts: Clickport will likely show more. The gap is your consent banner + ad blocker data loss in GA4.
- Top pages: The ranking should be roughly the same. If a page is #1 in GA4, it should be near the top in Clickport too.
- Traffic sources: Source distribution should be similar, but Clickport may show more Direct traffic (visitors who were invisible to GA4 due to consent rejection show up as Direct).
- Geographic distribution: Similar patterns, though Clickport will have more EU visitors (many of whom rejected GA4's consent banner).
What not to compare
- Bounce rate: The definitions are different. Don't expect these to match. Read what is bounce rate for the full breakdown.
- Returning visitors: GA4 tracks these with cookies. Clickport doesn't. This metric won't exist in Clickport.
- Engagement time: Both measure it differently. Compare trends, not absolute numbers.
When to feel confident
After 2-4 weeks, you should see:
- Clickport captures equal or more traffic than GA4
- Your top pages and sources show the same patterns
- Your goals trigger correctly (test each one)
- Your team can find everything they need on the dashboard
If all four check out, you're ready to remove GA4.
Removing GA4 and updating your privacy policy
Step 1: Remove the GA4 script
Delete the Google Analytics script tag from your site. If you're using Google Tag Manager, remove the GA4 tag from your GTM container. If GTM was only there for GA4 (common), you can remove the GTM container script entirely.
Step 2: Remove the cookie consent banner
If GA4 was the only reason you had a cookie consent banner, you can remove it. Clickport doesn't use cookies, doesn't store personal data, and doesn't require consent under GDPR or ePrivacy. (See the full GDPR compliance docs for details.)
Check whether you have other scripts that set cookies first (live chat widgets, marketing pixels, embedded videos with tracking). If Clickport is your only analytics tool and you have no other cookie-setting scripts, the banner can go.
Step 3: Update your privacy policy
Replace the Google Analytics section in your privacy policy. Remove references to:
- Google Analytics cookies (
_ga,_ga_*,_gid) - Data sharing with Google
- Google's data processing terms
- Consent Mode
Add a section about Clickport. You can reference the Clickport privacy overview for the specific language. The key points: no cookies, no personal data collection, data stored in the EU, no third-party data sharing.
Step 4: Clean up Google Tag Manager (optional)
If you're removing GTM entirely, delete:
- The GTM container snippet from your site's
<head>and<body> - Any consent management platform (CMP) scripts that were only there for GA4
- The GTM account itself (or archive the container)
This removes the 134 KB+ of JavaScript that GA4 and GTM were loading on every page. Your site just got faster. (For context on how much GA4 slows down your site, the honest comparison has the full breakdown.)
What about your historical GA4 data?
Clickport doesn't import data from GA4. Your GA4 data stays in your Google Analytics account for as long as Google retains it (14 months for Explorations, indefinitely for standard reports).
If you want to preserve your GA4 data long-term, export it before deleting your property:
- Standard reports: Use Looker Studio or the GA4 API to pull summary data into spreadsheets.
- Raw data: If you have BigQuery export enabled, your raw event data is already in BigQuery and won't be affected by removing GA4.
- Screenshots: For simple preservation, screenshot your key reports for the periods that matter.
You don't need to rush this. Your GA4 property continues to hold your data even after you remove the tracking script from your site. It just stops collecting new data.
Start your transition
The practical steps, from start to finish:
- Create a Clickport account (30-day free trial, no credit card)
- Add one script tag to your site
- Set up your goals to match your current GA4 conversions
- Run both tools for 2-4 weeks
- Compare the data and verify everything you need is there
- Remove GA4, update your privacy policy, and optionally remove your cookie banner
If you hit anything unexpected during the transition, the documentation covers every feature in detail, or reach out directly. You can also install the Clickport Chrome extension to see real-time stats for any page you visit.
For the full breakdown of what GA4 does better, what Clickport does better, and the honest trade-offs, read the Clickport vs Google Analytics comparison.
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