Google Analytics 4: what it is, how to set it up and what to actually track.

Almost every business has analytics installed. Very few use it to decide anything. You open the dashboard, see a line going up, close it, and next month you do exactly the same. Google Analytics 4 is not there to look pretty: it is there to tell you where your customers come from, which pages are losing them and where next month's budget should go.

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4, as you will see it everywhere) is Google's free tool for measuring what people do on your website or app: how they get there, what they look at, how long they stay and whether they end up buying, calling or filling in your form. It replaced Universal Analytics, switched off in 2023, so today it is the only option if you work with Analytics. You can check the detail of every report in the official Google Analytics help.

What changes in Google Analytics 4 compared with Universal Analytics

The big change is how it counts. The old version revolved around sessions and pageviews. Google Analytics 4 revolves around the event: every interaction is an event, whether that is opening a page, clicking "call", watching 75% of a video or completing a purchase. It sounds technical, but in practice it means something useful: you can measure things that used to slip through, and you can follow the same person across phone and desktop without counting them twice. For the tool's background, the Google Analytics entry on Wikipedia sums it up well.

The old bounce rate also loses its starring role, replaced by engagement: a visit counts as engaged if it lasts more than ten seconds, sees several pages or fires an event. It is a more honest way to look at traffic. Someone who reads a full article for three minutes and leaves has not "bounced"; they have read you.

Why Google Analytics 4 matters even if you are not technical

Without data you decide on gut feeling, and gut feeling in marketing tends to get expensive. With Google Analytics 4 set up properly you answer questions that are worth money in two minutes: where do buyers come from, Google or Instagram? Did this month's campaign bring sales or only visits? Which page converts and which one is a dead end? That is the raw material for improving your conversion rate without spending another euro on ads.

How to set up Google Analytics 4 step by step

Installing it is no mystery; what almost nobody does is configure it properly. These are the steps that matter:

1. Create the account and property. One property per site. Set the right time zone and currency before anything else: changing them later dirties your history.
2. Install the tag. The cleanest way is with Google Tag Manager, because you will be able to add or remove tracking later without touching the site's code.
3. Check real time. Visit your own site from your phone and see whether you appear in the "Realtime" report. If you do not, you are measuring nothing.
4. Mark your key events. Form submitted, phone click, WhatsApp message, purchase. Without this, Google Analytics 4 will tell you how many people arrive, but not how many buy.
5. Exclude your own traffic. Filter your office IP and the agency's. A small business can inflate its own numbers by 20% on its own.
6. Link Search Console and Google Ads. That way you see the words that bring you into Google and which campaigns end in a sale.
7. Raise data retention to 14 months. It ships with two, and with two months you cannot compare this Christmas campaign with last year's.

That gives you the foundation. From there, it is all about reading what the tool is telling you.

Events and key events in Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 has three kinds of events and it pays to tell them apart. Automatic ones arrive on their own (first visit, session start, page view). Enhanced measurement events are switched on with a toggle and record genuinely useful things: scrolls, outbound clicks, file downloads, searches inside your site. And custom ones you define yourself for whatever matters to you: "requested a quote", "called", "opened the chat".

Of all those, mark as a key event only the ones worth money. If you mark fifteen, you do not have fifteen conversions: you have fifteen numbers that mean nothing. Two or three well-chosen ones beat a dashboard full of blinking lights.

What to actually track in Google Analytics 4

The tool shows hundreds of figures and most of them are noise. These are the ones we use every month:

• Acquisition: where people come from (organic search, paid, direct, social, referrals). This is where you see which channel brings customers and which only brings noise.
• Landing pages: which page they arrive on. There are usually one or two doing most of the work, and it pays to know which.
• Key events and conversion rate: how many of the people who arrive end up doing what you want. That is the number that really rules.
• Engagement: whether people stay or leave after four seconds. Content that does not hold attention does not sell either.
• Device: compare mobile and desktop. If mobile converts at half the rate, you know where to start; we cover it in responsive web design.

Reports that help (and the ones you can ignore)

For day-to-day work, the standard Acquisition, Engagement and Monetisation reports are plenty. When you want to answer a specific question, use explorations: the funnel report shows you which step loses people (product page, cart, payment) and the free-form path shows the route they take before buying.

And some numbers you can safely ignore. Total users, with no context, says nothing: you can double your visits and sell the same. Always measure against something, even if it is only your own previous month.

Google Analytics 4, cookies and consent

If your site serves visitors in Europe, the cookie banner is not decoration. Google Analytics 4 can only measure people who accept, and for those who refuse Google models the behaviour through consent mode. The result: your data will always be an approximation, not a census. Set it up properly, be clear in the banner, and do not obsess over matching numbers to the decimal. The Spanish Data Protection Agency guidelines explain what you can ask for and how.

Common mistakes with Google Analytics 4

• Installing it and never marking a single key event. It is the most common mistake and leaves the tool half-working.
• Not filtering internal traffic: you, your team and the agency visiting every day.
• Duplicating the tag (the WordPress theme's and Tag Manager's at once): visits get counted twice and everything inflates.
• Looking only at total users and celebrating a rise that brought in no sales.
• Comparing months without thinking about seasonality. August looks nothing like November in most sectors.

How we work with analytics at Magnes Factory

At Magnes Factory we set up measurement before touching anything else, because without data every decision is a bet. This is how we do it:

• We define what counts: which action is a sale, a lead or a call in your specific business.
• We set up Google Analytics 4 with Tag Manager, mark the key events and clean out internal traffic.
• We link Search Console and Ads to see the whole journey, from the search to the sale.
• A monthly report with five numbers, not fifty, and one clear decision for the month ahead.

If you would rather we ran it for you, this is part of our digital marketing consulting work: measure, understand and decide with data instead of by eye.

Frequently asked questions