How to get started with Google Analytics 4
- May 12
- 11 min read
Updated: May 13
Author: James Clark
Google Analytics is without doubt the most popular website analytics platform in the world. But why do so many website owners turn to Google Analytics to understand their audiences’ behavior? There are several compelling reasons.
First, it’s free (or at least the free version is suitable for the vast majority of users). As you would expect, it plays nicely with Google’s other products, like Google Ads, Google Search Console, and the data warehouse tool, BigQuery. It’s also well established, with a large, knowledgeable community behind it and plenty of training available. Google even offers official certification.
The current version of Google Analytics, Google Analytics 4, builds on these longstanding benefits by offering a number of features of its own. These include powerful custom reports called “explorations,” improved user engagement analysis, and the ability to combine mobile app and website usage data—all so that you can analyze how visitors are behaving on your properties and optimize to meet your business goals.
Here’s everything you need to know to get started (and excel) with Google Analytics 4.
Table of contents:
Google Analytics 4 overview
The current version of Google Analytics is Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The previous version, Universal Analytics (UA), was shut down in 2024. Now, all historic data has been deleted from UA and the interface is no longer accessible. GA4 is the only option when it comes to Google Analytics.
Whenever you refer to online guides or documentation about Google Analytics, make sure they were written specifically for GA4. GA4 collects, stores, and reports on data in a different way to UA. The initial setup is quite different, too.
Before we dive into how GA4 works, let’s look at why you would want to use it in the first place.
What you can learn from GA4
As a website owner, it’s gratifying to see traffic on your site and fascinating to learn more about your users, both of which GA4 is invaluable for. But above all else, the platform is a tool for making business decisions.
For example, you can use it to inform your marketing strategy. Perhaps you spend a lot of time focusing on social media; GA4 can tell you whether that is driving users to your site and whether those users are converting. You might find that some other activity is quietly generating more revenue.
In the example above, we’ve discovered that average purchase revenue per user is hugely higher for email traffic than for any other channel. That’s definitely worth further investigation.
If you run a blog or a news site, GA4 can help shape your content strategy. It will tell you which content is attracting not just the most users, but also the most engaged users (or to put it another way, the ones least likely to bounce). Knowing what works for your audience and what doesn’t can ultimately help you learn more about what they prefer.
Once you have a grasp of GA4 and its capabilities, you can start to plan changes to your site that can help you achieve your business goals. And of course, GA4 will be on hand to measure how effective those changes are. This enables you to make incremental improvements to your site based on real data. Sounds good? Let’s get started.
Setting up your Google Analytics 4 account and property
To set up Google Analytics, you’ll need a free Google account. If you have a Gmail email address, then you already have a Google account. If not, you can sign up by following these instructions.
Next, navigate to Google Analytics. If this is your first time using Google Analytics, you’ll encounter a “welcome” screen; click on the blue Start measuring button to go to the “account setup” page.
If you already have access to at least one Google Analytics property, you’ll instead be taken to the “Home” for whichever property you viewed most recently. To get to account creation from here, click on Admin (the cog icon) at the bottom of the vertical, left-hand menu and then on Create > Account in the top left.
What you need to know about Google Analytics 4 account structures
We’re mentioning accounts and properties a lot, so it’s worth pausing to explain exactly how these two concepts work together in Google Analytics.
In short, a property represents a website or app you’re tracking. An account is a way of organizing one or more properties.
So for example, you could have an account containing a property for your business website and a property for your personal website. Or, because GA4 can be used on apps as well as websites, you might have a property for the iOS version of your app and another for the Android version.
(If you use Google Marketing Platform, there’s a third level to this structure: Organization. You don’t have to associate your GA4 account with an organization, but doing so means you can manage your analytics users directly in Google Marketing Platform. This is most useful for organizations with multiple GA4 accounts and properties—and users, of course.)
But at the simplest level, to use GA4, you’ll just need one account with one GA4 property in it. That’s what we’ll create now.
When you create a new account in GA4, you’ll create a new property at the same time. The setup process walks you through both. Any settings you choose here, such as your reporting time zone and website currency, can be changed later on anyway.
Two of the settings, Industry Category and Business Size, affect which other businesses you get compared against in GA4’s benchmarking feature.
A third setting, Business Objectives, has even more of an impact: Google will personalize its recommendations for you, and to an extent configure your property, based on the choice you make here. Until recently, it even determined which reports you could see.
By the end of the setup process, you'll have an account with a property in it—but no data yet. For that, you’ll need to set up a “data stream.”
Create a data stream
To start viewing information about how your users interact with your site, you'll first need to feed site data to Google Analytics via a data stream. Here’s how Google defines a data stream:
“A data stream is a flow of data from a customer touchpoint (e.g., app, website) to Analytics. When you create a data stream, Analytics generates a snippet of code that you add to your app or site to collect that data. Data is collected from the time you add the code, and that data forms the basis of your reports.”
When you first create a property, Google will helpfully guide you through the data stream setup process. If you navigate away, a big, blue notification on the GA4 homepage will prompt you to “Start collecting data for your website or app.” Here’s how the process works.
01. On the data streams page, choose your platform: Web, Android app, or iOS app. Although you can have more than one data stream feeding into the same property, a simple website setup will just have the one “Web” stream. Let’s click that now.
02. On the “Set up data stream” overlay, add your website URL and a stream name of your choice (you can use the URL again if you like, or just call it “Web stream”).
03. On the same overlay, choose whether you want enhanced measurement (it’s enabled by default). This is a GA4 feature that automatically tracks certain user interactions, such as scrolls and clicks on outbound links. Most of the time, you’ll want to leave it enabled.
04. Still under Enhanced Measurement, click the cog icon to access advanced settings for the Page Views event. Here you’ll find the option to track “page changes based on browser history events.” Without getting too technical, this option is to help Google Analytics 4 work with single-page applications (websites that don’t reload the page during the user’s journey). However, with some platforms, such as Wix, this option can cause duplicate pageviews. So Wix site owners will need to untick the box.
05. Click to Save your Enhanced Measurement settings, then click Create and continue.
06. Finally, on the web stream details page, the key piece of information is the Measurement ID. This will be a “G” followed by 10 letters and numbers, in the format G-XXXXXXXXXX. You’ll need this ID no matter which method you choose to tag your website with your analytics code.
How to tag your site
How you tag your site (that is, add the snippet of code that collects and sends data to Google Analytics) depends partly on the platform it’s built on. One popular option is to use Google Tag Manager, and you’ll find instructions for this on the web stream details page.
Some platforms and website builders offer GA4 integration without needing to install a third-party plugin. Let’s take a look at how Wix handles it:
Go to Settings > Marketing Integrations in your site’s dashboard.
Click Connect under Google Tag.
Click Add Google TagID.
Paste your Google Analytics 4 Measurement ID in the pop-up. Note: Make sure that there are no extra spaces before the code.
Select the IP Anonymization checkbox if you want to hide your site visitors’ IP addresses from Google.
Click Save.
Data may take time to appear
Once you’ve set up GA4, the first places you will see data begin to appear are the realtime reports (Reports > Realtime Overview or Reports > Realtime Pages). Google warns that it may take some time for data collection to start, but more than likely, it will happen almost straight away.
The realtime overview gives you a snapshot of users on your site over the past 5 and 30 minutes, including their locations, traffic sources, and “events.” Again without getting too technical, GA4 treats each user interaction on your site as an event—from session starts and pageviews, through to the enhanced measurement events we looked at earlier.
If data is showing up in your realtime reports, you can be confident your setup is working. But it could still take up to 48 hours for data to appear in the standard reports.
Find your way around GA4
Even if you've never used GA4 before, the layout of the homepage may seem familiar to you: it’s similar to the old Universal Analytics or other Google tools such as Google Ad Manager. You can access all the predefined reports using the menu on the left-hand side of the interface, swap between different accounts and properties using the dropdown menu in the top-left, and get to your admin settings via the link in the bottom-left.
Directly above the Admin icon, you’ll find an option to access “Tasks.” This Task Assistant, which Google rolled out in April 2026, lists things you can do to get the most out of your GA4 property—anything from linking to Google Ads through to setting up automated alerts.
Treat these as interesting suggestions rather than firm recommendations, as not all of them will be relevant or useful to your business. For example, if you don’t run ads, there’s no need to link GA4 to Google Ads.
The universal search box along the top is another powerful feature. You can search for the name of a specific report, but you can also ask questions about your data, such as “How many new users yesterday?”
Hint: a good place to start is by searching for “Tour." The results to this query, such as Admin Settings Tour and Reports Library Tour, give you a quick visual tour of different parts of the interface.
At the top of the universal search results, you’ll also see an option to “Ask analytics advisor.” This AI-powered chatbot can help you with broader or more subjective questions, such as “Is my traffic growing?” or “What is the best way to benchmark performance?”
Even with GA4’s powerful new AI capabilities, you’ll probably still find yourself turning to the standard reports regularly. Each report is made up of a number of “cards,” each card being an individual table or graph. You can customize these by clicking the “customize report” icon in the top-right (the one that looks like a pencil). And, of course you can designate a date range (the default setting shows the last 28 days).
Finally, many of the cards have a small dropdown menu in the top-left that lets you change the primary dimension. For example, you may be able to change “users” to “new users.” This makes the reports much more flexible.
GA4’s standard reports
GA4’s standard reports are organized into "topics," which are grouped into "report collections." These reports and collections can be reorganized as you like. This is powerful, but potentially confusing to new users, especially as the defaults have changed over time.
For example, if you want to see how your users are moving through your purchase funnel, you need the "Purchase journey" report. You’ll probably find it under “Business objectives > Drive Sales." But if your property is a little older, you might see it under “Life cycle > Monetization” instead.
To organize your reports, go to Reports > Library. Here you can “publish” collections (make them available in the Reports section), change which reports sit inside them, or even create your own brand new collections.
As I write this, all new GA4 properties have access to the “Business objectives” collection. Here are the topics it contains and some of the questions the reports in those topics can help you to answer.
Generate leads: Which channels do your users come from: organic, direct, paid search or something else? What pages are they landing on?
Drive sales: What are your users purchasing? How much revenue are you generating? What does the purchase journey look like?
Understand web and/or app traffic: Which pages are your users visiting? Which countries are they coming from?
View user engagement and retention: How engaged are your users? What events are your users performing? (This includes enhanced measurement events if you enabled them earlier.)
Explorations
Another reason that GA4 doesn’t offer so many standard reports is that it encourages users to create custom reports called “explorations.” Many different exploration methods are available, like “free-form” (which, by default, presents your data as a table), through, funnel exploration, and segment overlap. Fortunately, GA4 includes a template gallery with pre-built examples to help you understand how each exploration method works.
To build an exploration, start by selecting the relevant dimensions (categorical data such as country) and metrics (numerical data such as number of users), as well as adding segments, filters and so on. If you’ve used Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio, and before that, Data Studio), or created custom reports in Google Ad Manager, then this will be familiar to you; otherwise, it might be a bit of a learning curve.
But it’s worth persevering, as explorations are what makes GA4 so powerful. Fortunately, there are plenty of online guides to creating useful explorations, whether you want to explore your site search data or understand how far users are scrolling down the page.
Do your future self a favor and set up your GA4 property today
One of the most important capabilities that Google Analytics offers is the ability to compare how your current efforts are performing against previous baselines. But, you need to begin tracking that historical data to be able to compare it later. The sooner you set up your GA4 property, the more historical data you’ll have to compare against, which can help you make better business decisions.
Now if you really want to unlock the full value of your data, try linking GA4 with Google Search Console and use that powerful pair to understand your organic traffic. You can even use GA4 to automatically monitor your backlinks as part of an advanced SEO strategy.
James Clark is a web analyst from London, with a background in the publishing sector. When he isn't helping businesses with their analytics, he's usually writing how-to guides over on his website Technically Product. Twitter | Linkedin