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how-to guide

How to Connect Google Analytics to Your Website

Create a GA4 property, add the tracking tag to your site, and confirm the data is arriving.

Google Analytics doesn't measure anything until two things exist: a property to hold the data, and a small piece of tracking code on your site sending data to it. These are the steps from nothing to a site that's actually being measured.

Steps

  1. Go to analytics.google.com and sign in with the Google account you want to own the data long-term — a business account you'll still have access to in a few years, not a personal one.
  2. In Admin, choose Create, then Property. Give it your business name, and set the time zone and currency to the ones you actually report in — changing them later splits your history awkwardly.
  3. When GA4 asks what you're measuring, choose Web and enter your site's URL. That creates a web data stream and gives you a Measurement ID that looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX. One website normally needs exactly one stream.
  4. Install the tag using whichever of these three fits your site: paste the Measurement ID into your platform's built-in Google Analytics field (Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow and most WordPress SEO plugins have one), paste GA4's gtag.js snippet into the <head> of every page, or add a Google tag with that Measurement ID in Google Tag Manager and publish the container.
  5. Use only one of those three. Installing gtag.js and a Tag Manager tag for the same property is the usual reason every number comes out doubled.
  6. Open your own site in a browser, then check GA4's Realtime report. You should show up as a visitor within about half a minute. If nothing appears, the tag isn't firing on the page you loaded.
  7. Optional: connect the finished property to datanephew. It's a sign-in and picking the property from a list. Access is read-only, and every answer is fetched live rather than copied anywhere.

ask datanephew

Is my Google Analytics actually collecting data?

Ask datanephew to check what your site is measuring — it can read your GA4 setup and tell you whether the property is receiving traffic, and over what period.

Do I need Tag Manager, or is the plain tag enough?

The plain tag is enough for most small sites. Tag Manager earns its extra complexity once you're running several tracking tools at once — ask datanephew what's currently installed on your site if you aren't sure which you already have.