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Joshua Lee
- 5 Min Read
- Blog
How to Set Up GA4: A Marketer’s Clear Path to Smarter Tracking
Website analytics do not have to be complicated. If you want to understand your website traffic, you really need Google Analytics 4. But knowing how to set up GA4, properly, can be the difference between clean, actionable insights and messy, useless data
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s free analytics platform. It’s designed to give you better, more flexible reporting across websites and apps. All while being more privacy, data conscious and future proof.
In this short post, we want to help you understand how to set up GA4 from scratch, in just a few straightforward steps. Whether you’ve just started your business, launched a new website or need to implement tracking before you launch your newest marketing campaigns, ROAR has you covered.
What is GA4 and Why Should You Set It Up?
GA4 is Google’s current analytics platform. It tracks user interactions using an event-based model.
Instead of just knowing someone visited your site, GA4 tracks what they did while they were there, like clicking a button, watching a video, downloading a file, scrolling to the bottom of a page, or submitting a form.
Every action is treated as its own “event”, which gives you far more detail and flexibility. You’re no longer limited to just pageviews or goals, you can define success however you want.
This gives you a clearer view of how people behave on your site. That means you can see clicks and scrolls to video views and purchases.
Why Set It Up Now?
- It’s free! – And a powerful step into the world of website tracking and analytics.
- It’s required – Its predecessor, Universal Analytics no longer processes data.
- It’s future proof – Your data is future proof with better tracking and customisation options.
Setting up GA4 is one of the first and most important steps in understanding and growing your digital presence.
Here’s the thing though, while the process is easy and straightforward for someone well versed in technical marketing, one incorrect setting or plugin misfire can quietly break your data behind the scenes. We’ve fixed countless setups where tracking looked okay on the surface, but conversions were missing, and data was completely unreliable.
Let’s walk through the key steps, and highlight how to setup GA4, but also where it’s easy to go wrong. This way you can either get it right yourself or know when to stop and ask for help!
Step One: Creating A GA4 Property
To get started:
- Go to analytics.google.com and sign in with your Google account.
- In the Admin panel (bottom-left corner), select the account you’d like to use or create a new one.
- Under the “Property” column, click Create Property.
- Give your property a name (e.g. “YourSite.com”), choose your time zone and currency, then click Next.
- Select your business size and goals, then click Create.
Congratulations! You’ve now created a GA4 property — this is where all your website’s data will be collected and analysed.
If you’re feeling like you want to learn more about website analytics, why not check out our post on b2b website analytics metrics to track in GA4.
Step Two: Adding the GA4 Tag to Your Website
Once you have created your property, it’s now time to connect it to your website so it can start collecting data.
Option One – Using Google Tag Manager:
- Log into your Google Tag Manager account, or create one if you haven’t already.
- Create a new tag and select ‘Google Tag’.
- Enter the Measurement ID from your Google Analytics 4 property (found in GA4 under Admin > Data Streams > Web) into the ‘Tag ID’ box.
- Set the trigger to ‘Initialization – All Pages’.
- Save and publish your container.
Option Two – Adding the Tag Directly to Your Website:
- In your GA4 property, go to Admin > Data Streams > Web.
- Copy the provided ‘gtag.js snippet’.
- Paste it into the <head> section of every page on your website.
Once installed, your site is now connected to GA4 and ready to start collecting data. You can, of course, use a plugin to install GA4, but this can be very overcomplicated and lead to incorrect and inaccurate data.
We’d highly recommend using Google Tag Manager, it’s much easier and opens up a whole new world of possibilities for your marketing and GA4 account.
Common Mistakes and How to Fix Them:
Let’s pause now and reflect on some of the most common mistakes that we encounter and resolve on a weekly basis:
- Installing GA4 and Universal Analytics together, leading to double-counting.
- Using plugins that inject code incorrectly or only on some page types.
- Wrong tag triggers in Tag Manager, GA4 doesn’t fire, or fires too late
- Copy/paste errors when manually inserting the script in the wrong place.
- Missing consent controls, making your tracking non-compliant with GDPR.
If you’re unsure your setup is right, we offer a quick audit or full GA4 implementation to ensure everything’s tracking exactly as it should. Take a look at our website analytics service.
Step Three: Enable Enhanced Measurement
While GA4 will have this ticked by default for many users, it’s important to ensure that this has been added.
Common website actions are tracked automatically, which makes life a little easier as no extra setup is required for the following:
- Page views
- Scrolls
- Outbound link clicks
- Site search
- File downloads
- Video engagement.
To make sure these are on, go to your Web Data Stream settings and ensure Enhanced Measurement is toggled on. You can also toggle off any events you don’t want tracked. Sometimes Google Analytics 4 can actually be quite helpful…
Step Four: Define Key Events and Conversions
….and sometimes, it can be very unhelpful! Like their decision to rename ‘conversions’ to ‘key events’. Just pointless and confusing. Going forward, just remember that when we discuss key events, we mean website conversions.
As mentioned earlier, the platform automatically tracks general activity in the form of events. But in order for you to measure success, you need to create custom events and define which of them are key events. It’s up to you to define what really matters, for example:
- Contact form submissions
- Button clicks
- Newsletter signups
- Purchases
To Create Custom Events:
- Go to Admin > Events > Create Event
- Use conditions like page view + URL contains “/thank-you” to define the action
- Save, then mark it as a key event, if the custom event represents a goal.
This helps you track meaningful engagement, not just visits. Setting up custom events and conversions is much more flexible on Google Tag Manager, it’s something that we carry out for all clients to give full transparency.
Step Five: Test and Customise Your Reports
Once setup is complete, let GA4 collect data for a day or two. Then you can:
- Use Real-Time Reports to see if data is flowing, and view live data of real-time website visitors.
- Head to Explore > Free Form to build your own custom reports for deeper insights.
You can create custom reports, dashboards, funnels, path analysis and much more. This will give you tailored insights aligned with your goals.
Our final thoughts
Learning how to setup GA4 is the first step to understanding your audience and making smarter decisions with your marketing channels.
With just a few simple actions, you can unlock a deeper view of how users interact with your website and start gathering insights that can grow your business.
Don’t wait to setup GA4. The sooner it’s up and running, the better for you, your business and your bottom line.
Explore more tips on how to setup GA4 and get the most from your analytics account in our blog all about understanding website analytics.
Or, if you’re interested in learning more about search marketing as a whole, our dedicated search engine marketing blog is waiting for you!
