If you are looking to get started with Google Analytics 4, you’re in the right place. You will learn how to setup Google Analytics 4 and install it on your website using Google Tag Manager. It’s the perfect time to add the latest version of Google Analytics to your website, the previous version, Universal Analytics, will stop working. Before we walk through the steps to set up a new GA4 property.
Benefits of GA4
GA4 have new customization options, including the ability to customize the standard reports. Automatic tracking of important actions people take on your website. Including when people scroll, watch embedded YouTube videos, click outbound, links and more. If you have a website and an app you can consolidate data into a single set of reports.
Differences between GA4 and Universal Analytics
GA4 has a limited number of pre-configured reports. While Universal Analytics has a wider range of standard reports. GA4 introduces more ad-hoc reporting options to meet your needs. You can filter out internal traffic in both versions of Analytics. GA4 includes automatic tracking of important actions, while Universal Analytics doesn’t. And you can adjust the attribution model used for the standard reports in GA4.
We can configure cross-domain tracking. This is easier in GA4. We can link to Google Ads and other Google products. We can import additional data into our reports. And we can connect Google Analytics to Looker Studio, previously called Google Data Studio.
Checking Google Analytics versions
If you’re already using Universal Analytics, then we recommend setting up GA4 in parallel to your existing Universal Analytics property. If you’re not currently using Universal Analytics, then we recommend only setting up GA4 as it’s the latest version. Okay, let’s head to Google Analytics to see how we can identify which type of property we’re using. Logged in the google analytics and click the currently used property If you see the three columns. There is the account column on the left, then the property column in the middle, and a view column on the right. It is a Universal Analytics. Google Analytics 4, mention GA4 and they have two columns only.
Creating a GA4 property
Using the ‘Setup Assistant’, click the ‘Create Property’ button at the top. First, we need to name our new GA4 property. You can name your property anything you like, Then we need to select our reporting time zone. And currency. Now let’s click ‘Next’. We can then provide some details about our business. Then, click ‘Create’ at the bottom. Now we need to create our data stream. Once we create a stream it will mean we can either add the Google Tag for the stream to our website, or we can use the measurement ID for the stream to configure a tag in GTM
Since we’re tracking a website, let’s select ‘Web’. Now we need to enter the URL of our website. And name the stream. We can also see ‘Enhanced Measurement’ is enabled. This feature automatically tracks important actions on your website. We can click the configuration icon to see what will be automatically tracked. And if there are any actions you don’t want to track, you can disable them here. And let’s click ‘Create Stream’. We can see our data stream has been created.
Installing GA4 using Google Tag Manager
We can now copy the ‘Measurement ID’ on the top right corner and add this to our website using Google Tag Manager. If you’re not using Google Tag Manager on your website, then now is probably a good time to migrate your tracking code to tag manager. Using Google Tag Manager makes it easier if you want to install multiple tags on your website. You can also use tag manager to configure more advanced tracking, and in most cases, you won’t need to modify any code on your website. Now that we’ve copied the ‘measurement ID’, let’s head to Google Tag Manager. Let’s create a new tag. Name the tag ‘Google Analytics GA4 Page View’. And select ‘GA4 configuration’ as the tag type. Then we paste the measurement ID into the tag configuration. And now we need to select a trigger for the tag. Let’s select ‘all pages’. This will fire the tag on all the pages of our website and save the tag. We can now click ‘Submit’ to publish the changes to our website.
Overview of GA4 reports
To start exploring the reports, On the left, we can navigate between the different reports. The first is ‘Home’. This provides a top-level summary of your website. It’s also automatically personalized, so it will show you reports you’ve recently viewed, along with other automated insights.
Reports include dedicated reports showing you how people find your website, what pages they’ve viewed, if they’ve converted, plus demographics and details about the devices they’re using.
‘Explore’ lets you create custom reports, and you can visualize data in different ways. For example, you can create simple tables, funnel visualizations, and more.
‘Advertising’ lets you view the dedicated attribution reports. This is where you can see the relationship between your different marketing channels and how they lead to conversions on your website. ‘Configure’ is where you can customize data that is included in your reports. For example, this is where we will configure conversions.
Conclusion
In the end, you learn all about how to set up google analytics 4 and an overview of GA4 in this article. If you have any questions about GA4 put them in the comment box we will clarify.