Google Analytics 4 is installed on most websites and understood on very few. The default setup records that people visited without recording anything you would act on, and half the traffic is often your own team.
This guide covers a setup that answers a business question: where do enquiries come from, and which pages produce them.
- 1
Create the property and install the tag
Create a GA4 property at analytics.google.com and take the measurement ID. Most platforms have a field for it; otherwise install via Google Tag Manager. Set the reporting time zone and currency at creation — changing them later does not retrospectively fix historic data.
- 2
Exclude your own traffic immediately
Under Admin, then Data Streams, configure internal traffic filters for your office IP and set them to Active. For a small site, staff visits can be a large share of sessions. Do this on day one, because filters do not apply retrospectively.
- 3
Define what counts as a conversion
Page views are not a business outcome. Mark the events that matter — form submission, phone tap, email click, quote request — as key events. If nothing is marked, every report answers "how much traffic" and none answers "did it work".
- 4
Check the events are actually firing
Use DebugView, complete a form yourself and watch the event arrive. Assuming a conversion is tracked and finding out six months later that it never fired is the single most common analytics failure. Test every conversion route, including the phone link on mobile.
- 5
Link Search Console
Under Admin, link your Search Console property. This puts the search queries that led people to the site alongside what they did once they arrived — the two halves of the journey that are otherwise in separate tools with no join between them.
- 6
Extend the data retention setting
GA4 defaults to two months of user-level data. Change it to fourteen months under Data Settings. Without this, year-on-year comparisons are impossible, and you only discover it at the moment you need the comparison.
- 7
Build one report you will actually open
A single view: traffic source against conversions, monthly. That answers whether your marketing works. The default reports are built for everyone and therefore for nobody. One saved report beats a dashboard you never look at.
Consent and cookies
GA4 sets cookies, so UK GDPR and PECR require consent before it runs. A properly configured consent banner should block analytics until the visitor agrees. This does mean under-reporting — accept the gap rather than working around the law.
What to ignore
Bounce rate and average session duration attract more attention than they deserve, particularly on a site where a single page often answers the question completely. Conversions and traffic source are what change decisions.
Frequently asked questions
Universal Analytics stopped processing data in 2023 and historic data has since been removed. If you have not exported it, it is gone — another reason to set GA4 retention correctly now.
Would rather we did it?
These guides are here so you can do it yourself. If you would rather hand it over, that is what we do.
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