What Steps Should You Take To Set Up A Successful GA4 Property?

At its core, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is an entirely different new Analytics product when compared to the current Universal Analytics platform, and is focused on providing more data throughout the entire life cycle of the customer journey. With GA4, you’ll find that this new version of Google Analytics contains more data about the customer after they’ve been acquired, such as their level of engagement, monetization, and retention.

Although GA4 won’t fully take over the job of Universal Analytics until July of 2023, as many have already said, it’s a smart idea to get ahead now and get your GA4 account set up as soon as possible, assuming you haven’t done that already. This means you’ll be ahead of the curve when we finally get to July of next year.

Nicole Farley has written an article for Search Engine Land where she talks about the advice of Russel Ketchum and Steve Ganem (Google’s Director of Analytics and Group Product Manager at Google Analytics respectively), where they help us implement GA4 in 11 steps.

1. Start by structuring your GA4 accounts to meet the needs of your business
2. Use the Setup Assistant
3. Add the Google Analytics tag to your site so you can start collecting data
4. Import Google Ads links from Universal Analytics into the new GA4 property
5. Use custom events by mapping Universal Analytics custom events to GA4
6. Import Universal Analytics goals into GA4 so you can better understand how your websites and apps are performing
7. Validate and bid on GA4 conversions in Google Ads so you can enhance your bid optimization
8. Build relevant audiences in GA4 and activate them where ever they are most useful
9. If you’re selling products online, set up ecommerce in GA4 properties to make sure they are using names and parameters that will provide the most useful ecommerce reporting
10. Copy Universal Analytics property users to GA4 property manually or through the automated tool
11. Get familiar with the navigation, standard reporting available, as well as customizing reporting

Read the full Search Engine Land post here