Google Analytics 4: what to set up before your site goes live

What GA4 measures, and what it does not

GA4 measures what happens after someone arrives. It does not know what they searched for on Google: Google withholds the query from analytics tools, which is exactly why Search Console exists as a separate product.

It also does not measure people who blocked the script, and on a small site that is a bigger share than most reports admit. Treat GA4 numbers as a floor, not a census.

The setup order that keeps the data clean

• Create the property with the right time zone and currency BEFORE any traffic arrives. Google warns that changing the time zone later does not rewrite historical data, so you end up with a seam in every report.

• Turn on internal traffic filtering and add your own IP. Leave the filter in «Testing» for a day, check it is catching you, then set it to «Active». I skipped this and measured myself for three weeks.

• Set data retention to 14 months. The default is 2, and the setting only affects exploration reports, but 2 months means you cannot compare a quarter with the one before it.

• Link Search Console to the property. It is free and it puts the query data next to the behaviour data, which is the only way to read either one honestly.

A click is not a contact

On a service site the temptation is to mark the WhatsApp or email click as a conversion and call it a day. That event fires when the link is pressed, not when a conversation happens, and GA4 cannot see what happens after the browser hands off to another app.

I have one property where the same intent was being counted by two events with different names, one from a button and one from a floating widget. The total looked healthy and half of it was the same person pressing twice. If you name events, name them once and write the names down.

Read it next to Search Console, not instead of it

The two products answer different halves of the same question. Search Console says what Google showed and who clicked; GA4 says what happened next. Either one on its own produces a confident wrong conclusion.

A page with impressions and no clicks is a title and description problem. A page with clicks and no engagement is a content problem, or a speed problem, which is what Core Web Vitals measure. You cannot tell those apart from inside one tool.

If you want to check it yourself

Four minutes, no setup:

• Open Realtime, then open your own site in another tab. If you appear in Realtime, your internal traffic filter is not working and every number you have includes you.

• Open Admin, then Data Settings, then Data Retention. If it says 2 months, change it now: the setting is not retroactive.

• Open Reports, then Acquisition. If «Organic Search» is close to zero on a site that is indexed, check that your tag is on every page, not just the home page.

Watch it explained, by the people who built it

Three short videos from Google's own channels. They are the same source the links above point to, in video form:

• Reports in Google Analytics · Google Analytics, 16 minutes. A tour of the interface, which is the part no article replaces.

• Create and manage events · Google Analytics, 4 minutes. Official Analytics Academy lesson on what an event is.

• Key Events and Conversions · Google Analytics, 4 minutes. Why «conversions» became «key events», which matters if you follow an older tutorial.