Updated: October 9, 2024
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—from Google Ads to 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 latest version of Google Analytics builds on these longstanding benefits by offering a number of new 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). Although it was introduced back in 2020, many users stuck with the previous version of the tool, Universal Analytics (UA), until it stopped collecting data in 2023.
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.
If you were a user of UA, you may be surprised how different GA4 is from its predecessor. Although the user interface looks reassuringly familiar, everything under the hood has changed. GA4 collects, stores, and reports on data in a new way. The initial setup, too, is different. This means that you can’t use online guides or documentation about UA to help you navigate GA4.
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, the platform is above all else 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 our 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 at the bottom of the vertical, left-hand menu and then on the blue Create Account button.
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.
Universal Analytics also had a third level, “views,” so each property could have one or more views with different filters applied. However, this concept doesn’t exist in GA4, so at the simplest level, to use GA4, you’ll need an account with a GA4 property in it. That’s what we’ll create now.
From account setup, Google walks you through a few short pages of settings, asking for information such as your time zone and email communications preferences (which you can change later on anyway). It’s pretty straightforward, but watch out for the step called “Business objectives”: your choice here personalizes the types of report that appear in your GA4 property. If you aren’t sure, tick “Other” to get access to multiple types of report.
By the end of the process, you will 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, it will prompt you to go back via a big, red Go to stream setup button at the top of the screen.
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. Although it was possible to track these interactions with Universal Analytics, they didn’t come “out of the box,” so this is a big step forward. Most of the time, you’ll want to leave it enabled and click Create & continue.
04. Still under Enhanced Measurement, click the cog icon to access advanced settings for the Page View 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. 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 Analytics.
Click Add Google Analytics ID.
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 place you will see data begin to appear is the realtime overview (Reports > Realtime). 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 report 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 report, you can be confident your setup is working. But it could still take up to 24–48 hours for data to appear in the standard reports.
Find your way around GA4
For experienced users, the layout of the GA4 homepage is similar to the old Universal Analytics. 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.
The universal search box along the top is a 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?”
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.
When viewing an individual report, you’ll see it’s 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 has fewer predefined reports than Universal Analytics, and at launch it was missing some popular UA reports. This proved something of an annoyance for migrating users!
Google has since reintroduced some of the missing reports, such as the landing page report, and in general GA4 needs fewer reports because the ones it does have are more flexible.
The default reports are divided into sections including:
Acquisition: Which channels do your users come from—organic, direct, paid search or something else? Within this section, the traffic acquisition report lets you compare various channels to see which has the highest engagement rate, number of conversions, and so on.
Engagement: How “sticky” are your users—that is, how likely are they to return to the site? This section also covers events. One particularly interesting chart (shown below) plots event count over time, so you can see when there is a sudden change to one event relative to the others and troubleshoot it to keep users progressing through your customer journey.
User Attributes (previously Demographics): How does your audience break down by age, location, gender, and language? What interests do they share? The demographic details report shows engagement rate for each individual country, age bracket, gender and so on. This can help you understand who your content is resonating with—and who it is not.
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, from “free-form” (which, by default, presents your data as a table), through to 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 Looker 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 guides online 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 check out our guide to understanding 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