How to Set Up GA4 Properly and Measure Whether Your Marketing Works

To set up GA4 correctly, create a Google Analytics 4 property and a web data stream, install the Google tag on every page (through Google Tag Manager or your CMS), then do the steps most people skip: turn on enhanced measurement, extend data retention to 14 months, filter out your own team’s visits, mark the actions that matter to your business as key events, and link GA4 to Google Ads and Search Console. The install takes minutes. The rest is what turns GA4 from a visitor counter into a way of telling which marketing brings in business.

This guide walks through that setup, what to track, and how to use it to judge whether a campaign worked.

Why the setup matters

GA4 records everything as events: a page view, a scroll, a click, a form submitted. That makes it flexible, but it also means it only reports on the things you’ve told it to treat as important. Out of the box, it can tell you how many people visited. It can’t tell you how many of them became enquiries.

Say you run a B2B consultancy and you’re about to spend three months on LinkedIn ads promoting a downloadable guide, with Google Ads running alongside. At the end of the quarter, someone will ask whether it was worth it. With a basic install, the honest answer is “traffic went up”. With a proper setup, you can say how many guide downloads and meeting requests each channel produced, and what each one cost.

How do I set up GA4 correctly?

Work through these steps in order. Most of them live under Admin in GA4.

1. Create the property and a web data stream. You’ll get a Measurement ID beginning with “G-“.
2. Install the Google tag on every page. Google Tag Manager gives you the most control. On WordPress, Google’s Site Kit plugin or your SEO plugin can add it for you. Use one method only.
3. Check enhanced measurement is on. It automatically tracks page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, file downloads and form interactions.
4. Set data retention to 14 months. The default is two months, which limits the detailed exploration reports to recent data.
5. Filter internal traffic. Define your office IP addresses as internal traffic and activate the filter, so your team’s visits don’t inflate the numbers.
6. List unwanted referrals. If customers pay through a provider such as Stripe or PayPal, add its domain so returning buyers aren’t counted as referrals from it.
7. Mark your key events. Key events are the actions that matter to your business (Google called them conversions until 2024). More on choosing them below.
8. Link Google Ads and Search Console. Ads data shows cost against results. Search Console shows which searches brought people in.
9. Set up consent properly. UK privacy rules govern analytics and advertising cookies, so make sure your cookie banner and Google’s Consent Mode work together, and that GA4 respects each visitor’s choice.

Then test it. Open GA4’s DebugView or the Realtime report, submit your own form and check the event arrives once, with the right name.

What should you track in GA4?

Track the actions that show someone is becoming a customer, and mark those as key events. For most business websites, that means:

• Enquiry form submissions, ideally tracked from the confirmation message or thank-you page so failed submissions aren’t counted.
• Clicks on phone numbers and email addresses, especially from mobile.
• Meeting or appointment bookings, including from embedded calendar tools.
• Downloads of guides, brochures or price lists.
• Purchases with their value, if you sell online.

For the consultancy, the key events would be the guide download, the contact form and a booked discovery call. Everything else, such as scroll depth or video plays, is useful context but shouldn’t be counted as success.

GA4 will tell you exactly what you ask it to. Decide what a good outcome looks like before the campaign starts, then make sure it’s being recorded.

How do you measure the success of a digital marketing campaign?

Measure a campaign against the business outcome it was meant to produce, and compare the cost of each result across channels. In practice, that’s four steps.

1. Set the goal and the number before you launch. “Generate 40 qualified enquiries at under £150 each” is measurable. “Raise awareness” isn’t, unless you decide how you’ll measure awareness.

2. Tag every link with UTM parameters. These are short additions to a URL (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that tell GA4 exactly which ad, email or post sent a visitor. Google Ads tags its own links automatically once linked. LinkedIn, Meta, email and printed QR codes all need tagging by hand, or the visits end up lumped together.

3. Read the right reports. The Traffic acquisition report shows sessions and key events by source and campaign. Engagement rate shows whether visitors from each campaign actually interacted with the site. The Landing pages report shows which pages turned visits into enquiries.

4. Compare cost per result, then look at quality. Divide each channel’s spend by its key events. Then follow up in your CRM: forty enquiries from one channel that never buy are worth less than ten from another that do. GA4 shows what happened on the website. Your sales records show what it was worth.

Website behaviour and conversions

It helps to keep the two kinds of measure separate. Behaviour metrics, such as engagement rate and pages per session, tell you whether the right people are arriving and finding what they expected. If a campaign brings plenty of visitors with a very low engagement rate, the ad and the landing page probably don’t match. Conversion metrics, your key events, tell you whether the campaign produced business. A campaign needs both to look healthy.

What is engagement rate, and where is bounce rate?

GA4 counts a session as engaged if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event or includes at least two page views. Engagement rate is the share of sessions that were engaged. Bounce rate is still available as its opposite: the share of sessions that weren’t engaged. It’s not shown in reports by default, but you can add it.

What are the most common GA4 setup mistakes?

These are the setup problems we come across most often:

• The tag installed twice, through a plugin and Tag Manager, so every page view is counted double.
• No key events set, so reports show traffic but nothing about results.
• Data retention left at two months, so year-on-year analysis in explorations is impossible.
• Payment providers showing as top referrers, because unwanted referrals weren’t listed.
• Untagged campaigns, leaving LinkedIn or email traffic hidden in “direct” or “referral”.
• Thank-you pages counted on every reload, inflating enquiries.
• The property owned by a former agency or employee. Make sure your business holds the admin access.

If you’re also checking how Google sees your site, our guide to fixing your website with Google Search Console pairs well with GA4.

How we approach analytics

We set up and audit GA4 as part of our SEO and marketing work for growing businesses: the tag, the key events, consent and the links to Google Ads and Search Console, tested end to end. Our monthly reports then tie what we’ve done to the enquiries it produced. You can read more about our SEO services, or about running paid campaigns that GA4 can measure properly.

FAQs

How do I set up GA4?

Create a GA4 property and web data stream, then install the Google tag on every page using Google Tag Manager or your CMS. After that, turn on enhanced measurement, set data retention to 14 months, filter internal traffic, mark your key events and link Google Ads and Search Console. Test with DebugView before relying on the data.

What are key events in GA4?

Key events are the actions you mark as important to your business, such as an enquiry form submission, a phone call click or a purchase. Google renamed them from “conversions” in 2024. GA4 reports on them by channel and campaign, which is how you see which marketing produces results.

Does GA4 have a bounce rate?

Yes. GA4 defines bounce rate as the percentage of sessions that were not engaged, the opposite of engagement rate. An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event or has at least two page views. Bounce rate isn’t in the standard reports by default, but you can add it.

What happened to Universal Analytics?

Universal Analytics stopped processing data in July 2023 and was replaced by Google Analytics 4. Google has since shut down access to Universal Analytics properties, so historical data that wasn’t exported has gone. Any site still relying on an old Universal Analytics tag is recording nothing.