Last Updated on August 26, 2024

Creating A New GA4 Property

  1. Go to the admin section of Google Analytics. Click “+ Create” and then “Account”
  2. Fill out the “Account name” using the client’s name and the press the “Next” button.
  3. Enter a property name (again, use the client’s name) and change time zone and currency settings.
  4. Click the “Next” button and fill out the business information and the press the “next” button.
  5. You will then choose the “Business Objectives”. Click “Create”.
  6. You will then need to accept the terms of use for Google Analytics to create the account.

Create the Data Stream

Google uses Data Streams to differentiate different types of data.  They specifically mention 3 types of data streams.  1) website traffic 2) android app traffic and 3) iOS app traffic. Google recommends that you set up a different data stream for each of these. Since we almost exclusively work with website we are only going to focus on the “Web” data stream.

If you are doing this as part of the account set-up, you will automatically be taken to set-up the data stream. If you aren’t doing this as part of an account set-up, you can go to the admin section and navigate to the “Data Streams” section.

  1. Choose platform (usually “web”)
  2. Input website URL and name it “Client Name – Website” or whatever makes sense.
  3. Leave enhanced measurement checked.
  4. Click Create.
  5. Once the stream is created you will see a “Measurement ID”. You will use this later on to install GA4 on the website if you install through GTM.

Adding New Users

If we are creating an account for a client please make sure you add the client as a user to the account with full access.  You will have to use a Google email to create the account.  Please update the Client Master sheet to indicate that the client has access and with what email.

Give the client access at the account level with full admin access.

Add GA4 to GTM

  1. Open the clients GA4 Account.
  2. Go to the GA4 property in Google Analytics and copy the measurement ID by either typing “measurement ID” into the search box at the top and clicking the “copy” button that pops up, or you can go to the admin section, click on “Data Streams”, select the stream, and copy the measurement ID on the right side of the page
  3. Open the client’s GTM account
  4. Click on “Tags” on the left side-bar and select “New”
  5. Select “Tag Configuration”, then “Google Analytics”
  6. Then select “Google Tag”
  7. Paste the Measurement ID into the “Tag ID” box
  8. Scroll down and select “Triggering”, then select “All Pages”, then “Save”
  9. Name the tag “Google Analytics GA4 Configuration”. Click “Save”
  10. Be sure to also publish the changes in GTM.

Alternative Method(s) for Installing GA4

If for some reason you don’t want to or you can’t use GTM on a website you will need to do something different.  This will need to be determined on a case by case basis.  With WordPress sites, it is possible/likely that the site uses a plugin of some sort to load Google Analytics.  If this plugin supports GA4 you should be able to insert the “Measurement ID” into their entry field and be all set.  If you need to hardcode the GA4 code into the header.php file then you will want to follow the steps below:

Install GA4 using Global site tag

  1. Open the data stream in Google Analytics and toggle the “Global site tag(gtag.js)” section.
  2. Copy this code and paste it in the <head> section of the website.  If you don’t know how to do this please ask someone else for help or give the code and instructions to the client to do for you.
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