GA4 Breaks B2B Analytics — Here’s What to Do Instead
And why GA5 / “GA next” won’t be the silver bullet either
B2B marketers are losing deals today because they’re measuring the wrong things. GA4 didn’t just fail to fix analytics, it’s actively making them worse.
To put it bluntly; GA4 doesn’t measure accounts, it measures cookies. And B2B doesn’t buy with cookies.
This leaves us with an uncomfortable truth: GA4 was never built for B2B — and it’s only getting worse. And actually it’s getting quite a lot worse, thanks to consent and GDPR - with many clients finding an attribution and measurement cliff top
GA4 launched in 2020 as the “future of analytics.” Five years later, teams are still migrating. Meanwhile, Google has already moved on — quietly testing GA5, an AI-first version that doubles down on consumer funnels.
GA5 is already in motion. Google is quietly testing its “next evolution” — an AI-first, privacy-forward version of GA. But just like GA4, its DNA is ecommerce and consumer funnels, not enterprise buying groups.
Regulation has gutted GA’s accuracy. GDPR, ePrivacy, and PCR laws have pushed GA behind the cookie wall. In some markets, up to 90% of sessions vanish unless users accept tracking, leaving GA to stitch journeys together with probabilistic guesses. As such; Regulation has gutted GA’s accuracy. What you see in the dashboard isn’t the truth, it’s Google’s machine learning “best guess.” That might work if you’re measuring a TikTok shop funnel. For a $500k enterprise software deal, it’s worthless.
And for B2B, where the stakes are multi-year, multi-stakeholder buying cycles, the gap between what GA measures and what you actually need is now a chasm.
Why GA4 Can’t See Companies
GA4’s entire model is designed for ecommerce. It follows individuals across countless touchpoints, linking micro-interactions with cookie-based attribution.
But B2B buying doesn’t look like that. A single buying cycle might generate 60–100 website sessions spread over months or years. Those sessions come from different people in the same company: the researcher, the budget holder, the technical evaluator, the end user.
GA4 treats each one as a disconnected user. What you really need is a coherent story of one account progressing through a buying journey. GA4 can’t do it.
If your analytics can’t roll up to the company level, you’re not doing B2B measurement — you’re doing consumer reporting in disguise.
14 Months vs 3-Year Buying Cycles
GA4’s data retention maxes out at 14 months. For consumer purchases that’s fine. But enterprise B2B deals? Procurement cycles often last multiple years.
By the time your prospect finally converts, GA4 has already deleted half their journey.
Surface Metrics Masquerading as Insight
Most B2B teams I see are using GA4 as a glorified traffic trend tool:
Time on site
Pages visited
Source comparisons
Demo request completions
Those are useful indicators at a surface level, but they don’t connect to buying groups or pipeline. When you try to stitch GA4 to your CRM after the fact, the translation is clunky and you lose critical insight.
B2B Basics Made Hard
GA4 even makes simple B2B tracking unnecessarily complex.
Form tracking that took one minute in Universal Analytics now takes 16.
Custom metrics and dimensions are capped at 50 per property.
For consumer brands, that’s fine. For B2B companies trying to track engagement across multiple accounts, buying stages, and attributes — it’s suffocating.
Dashboards Without Pipeline
GA4 creates false confidence. Dashboards look full of data. But none of it reveals account-level intelligence.
You can’t see when new members of a buying group show up. You can’t trace a company from early research through to surging intent.
The result? A reporting layer that feels comprehensive but leaves pipeline dark.
The Hard Truth
GA4 will always be a consumer analytics tool dressed up for business use. The sooner B2B teams stop pretending otherwise, the sooner analytics can actually improve.
What We Cover in the Paid Section
Inside the premium section of this post, we go deep on:
The 4 capabilities GA4 will never deliver for B2B (account rollups, buying group detection, multi-year persistence, pipeline signals).
What to use instead — from FunnelFuel Analytics (the #1 option for B2B) to lighter-weight Matomo/Journey setups, IP enrichment layers, and CDP/warehouse options.
GA5 explained — what it’s rumored to bring, why it won’t fix B2B, and how to plan your stack now instead of waiting for Google.
A practical B2B analytics stack playbook you can implement today to replace GA4 and tie analytics directly to pipeline.
