Website analytics setup

The settings most GA4 installations get wrong

Google Analytics 4 is easy to install and easy to install badly. The default data retention for detailed reports is two months, which means that by spring, you cannot compare this January's visitor behaviour with last January's. Raising it to fourteen months takes a minute and is missed on most sites we see.

Internal traffic is the next. Every visit from your own office, your developer and your agency counts as a visitor unless it is filtered out. On a small business site that can be a real share of all traffic. Payment gateways are another common trap: a customer who leaves to pay through PayPal or a card provider and returns gets recorded as a new visit from that gateway, and the sale is credited to it instead of to the ad or search that brought them.

• Data retention raised to the maximum
• Office and developer traffic filtered out
• Payment providers listed as unwanted referrals
• Duplicate tags removed, so each page view counts once

Deciding what to track before tracking it

GA4 records page views and a few automatic interactions on its own. What it does not know is which actions matter to your business. A form submission, a click on your phone number, a brochure download or a booking are invisible until someone sets them up as events and marks the important ones as key events.

We start with a short list, usually five to twelve actions, that show whether the site is doing its job. Tracking everything is tempting and makes reports harder to read. Each event is built in Tag Manager, tested in preview mode with a real submission, and recorded in a setup document so the next person can see exactly what fires and when.