Setting Up Google Analytics 4 Properly
By CodexierPublished 6 min read
Google Analytics 4 is installed on most Swedish company sites and correctly configured on few of them. The default setup counts page views and little else, mixes your own staff's visits with customers', keeps data for two months, and has no idea what a conversion is for your business. This guide covers the handful of settings that turn GA4 from a vanity dashboard into something you can make decisions on.
The short answer
This is the checklist behind our tracking and analytics setup; the aim is data you can act on, not a long list of features.
Property and data stream
A property is the container for one business's data; a data stream is one source, such as your website or your app. The common mistake is to create a new property for every site redesign or agency, which fragments history. Create one property, name it after the company, set the time zone to Sweden and the currency to SEK, and add one web stream for the site. If you have an app, add it as a stream in the same property so cross-platform reports work. Install the tag through Google Tag Manager rather than pasting it into the theme; every later change then happens in one place, and the consent gating in the next sections becomes possible.
- Enable enhanced measurement, but review what it turns on: scroll and outbound clicks are useful, site search only if you have a search box, video only if you embed video.
- Link Search Console and, if you advertise, Google Ads, from the property's admin. Both links are free and add data you cannot get otherwise.
- Give access by Google account per person, never by sharing a login, and remove people who leave.
Events vs key events
Everything in GA4 is an event, including a page view. Key events, previously called conversions, are the events you tell GA4 matter to the business. Without them GA4 can tell you that people visited and left; with them it can tell you which channels produce enquiries. Start from the actions that make you money and work backwards to how a website records them.
| Business action | Event to record | How it is captured |
|---|---|---|
| Contact form sent | generate_lead | Tag Manager trigger on successful submission, not on button click |
| Phone number tapped on mobile | phone_call_click | Click trigger on tel: links |
| Booking completed | book_appointment | Thank-you page view or booking tool callback |
| Purchase | purchase with value and items | The shop's own GA4 integration or a data layer push |
| Quote requested | request_quote | Form submission with form name as a parameter |
Use Google's recommended event names where one exists; reports and Google Ads understand them without extra configuration.
Mark only real business outcomes as key events. If scrolling to the bottom of a page is a key event, your conversion rate is meaningless and your ad platform will optimise for scrollers.
Filtering internal traffic
For a small company, the owner, the staff and the agency can be a noticeable share of visits, and they behave nothing like customers: they open the site daily, visit every page and never convert. GA4 lets you define internal traffic by IP address and then filter it out. Add the office IP and the agency's, activate the filter, and remember that people working from home are not covered. For the developer's test visits, use a separate test property or the debug view rather than polluting production data. Also exclude referrals from your own payment provider and booking tool, or every purchase will be credited to Klarna rather than to the channel that brought the customer.
Retention and reports
GA4's default keeps event-level data for two months, after which year-on-year comparisons in explorations stop working. Set retention to the maximum the property allows on day one; you cannot recover data retroactively. Then build a small number of reports you will actually open: which channels bring key events, which landing pages bring them, and a monthly view of key events over time. Save them, share them with whoever makes marketing decisions, and ignore the rest of the interface. A dashboard with fifty metrics is read by no one.
When you do not need this, or us: a site with almost no traffic and no marketing spend gains nothing from a careful GA4 setup, and a cookie-free tool that needs no banner may serve you better; our comparison of cookie-free analytics alternatives explains the trade. If you run campaigns and need to know which ones produce enquiries, a correct setup pays for itself in the first month of spend. Book a call and we will look at your current property together; the fixed price for a full setup is on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Should I install GA4 directly or through Google Tag Manager?
Through Tag Manager. It lets you add events, change consent handling and add other tools without editing the site, and it makes consent gating far easier to get right. Direct installation is acceptable only for the simplest sites with no events beyond page views.
Why does GA4 show fewer visits than my old Universal Analytics did?
Because it counts differently and, once consent mode is configured correctly, because it only counts visitors who accepted cookies. The second is not a fault; it is what the law requires. Compare trends over time within GA4 rather than absolute numbers against the old tool.
How do I track purchases in a Shopify or WooCommerce shop?
Use the platform's own GA4 integration or its Tag Manager data layer, so that purchase events carry value, currency and items. Setting up purchase tracking by hand from the thank-you page loses the item data and often double-counts on refresh.
Can GA4 tell me which Google Ads campaign produced a booking?
Yes, once Google Ads is linked to the property, auto-tagging is on, and the booking is a key event. Import the key event into Google Ads and campaigns can then be optimised toward bookings rather than clicks.
Not sure your GA4 numbers can be trusted?
Give us view access to your property. In fifteen minutes we check key events, consent handling, internal traffic and retention, and tell you what to fix before you make another decision on the data.
Book a free 15-minute call