How to Switch to Google Analytics 4

Thinking about finally making the switch to Google Analytics 4? You're not alone. While Universal Analytics (UA) has officially stopped processing new data, many businesses are still navigating the transition. This guide will walk you through setting up GA4, step-by-step, without the technical jargon or stress. We'll cover everything from creating your new property and installing the tracking tag to recreating your most important conversions.

Why Bother with GA4? And How It's Different from What You're Used To

Before we jump into the "how," let's quickly touch on the "why." GA4 isn't just a new version of Google Analytics, it's a completely different way of thinking about your website and app data. Understanding the core changes will make the new interface feel much more intuitive.

The biggest shift is from a session-based model (in Universal Analytics) to an event-based model. In UA, everything revolved around sessions - a group of user interactions within a given timeframe. In GA4, every interaction is an event. A page view is an event. A scroll is an event. A click is an event. A purchase is an event.

This approach gives you a much more flexible and complete picture of the user journey. Here are the key differences at a glance:

• User-Centric Tracking: GA4 is designed to follow users, not just sessions. It uses smart technology to track a single user's journey across different devices (like their phone and laptop), giving you a more unified view of their behavior.
• Events Are Everything: As mentioned, almost everything is an event. This replaces the old "Category, Action, Label" system for tracking specific interactions. You can now define up to 300 custom events to track what matters most to your business.
• Combined Web and App Data: If you have both a website and a mobile app, GA4 allows you to see data from both in a single property, making cross-platform analysis much simpler.
• Privacy-Focused by Design: GA4 was built for a modern, privacy-conscious web. It no longer logs IP addresses by default and provides more granular data retention controls.
• Hello, Engagement Rate: Say goodbye to Bounce Rate. GA4 introduces Engagement Rate, a more useful metric that measures the percentage of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least two pageviews. An "engaged session" is the opposite of a bounce.

Before You Begin: A Quick Pre-Migration Checklist

A little preparation can save you a lot of headaches later. Before you start the setup process, take 15 minutes to gather the following:

• Admin Access: Make sure you have Administrator-level access to the Google Analytics account you want to upgrade. You'll need it to create new properties and modify settings.
• Current Tracking Method: Do you know how Universal Analytics is installed on your site right now? Is it through a theme setting in Shopify, a plugin on WordPress, Google Tag Manager, or hard-coded into your site’s HTML? Knowing this will make installing the new GA4 tag much easier.
• A List of Key Goals: Open your Universal Analytics property and go to Conversions > Goals. Make a quick list of the goals you actually care about. Is it contact form submissions? Newsletter sign-ups? Demo requests? You'll be recreating these as "conversions" in GA4.

The Official Switch: A Step-by-Step Guide to GA4 Setup

Ready to go? The good news is that Google has made the initial setup process quite simple. Moving to GA4 doesn't delete your old Universal Analytics property, it creates a new, separate GA4 property that will run alongside it.

Step 1: Use the GA4 Setup Assistant

This is the easiest way to get started. The Setup Assistant walks you through creating your new GA4 property and copies some of the basic settings from your UA property.

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Click on Admin in the bottom-left corner (the gear icon).
3. Make sure your desired Account and Universal Analytics Property are selected in the columns.
4. In the Property column, the very first option should be GA4 Setup Assistant. Click it.
5. You'll see a box that says "I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property." Click the blue Get Started button.
6. A pop-up will appear. As long as your site uses the gtag.js snippet, you can check the box to "Enable data collection using your existing tags." If you use something like Google Tag Manager or a CMS plugin, don't worry - we'll handle that in the next step.
7. Click Create property.

That's it! You now officially have a GA4 property. The assistant will have connected it to your old UA property, but it's not collecting data just yet. For that, we need to install the tag.

Step 2: Install the GA4 Tag on Your Website

Your new GA4 property has its own unique Measurement ID (it starts with "G-"). You need to add this tag to your website to start collecting data. The method you choose depends on how your site is built.

Method A: Using Google Tag Manager (Recommended)

If you're already using Google Tag Manager (GTM), this is the cleanest and most scalable way to manage your tags.

1. From your new GA4 Property's Admin screen, go to Data Streams and click on your website's data stream.
2. Copy your Measurement ID (e.g., G-XXXXXXXXXX) in the top right.
3. Open your Google Tag Manager container in a new tab.
4. Go to Tags and click New.
5. Name your tag something clear, like "GA4 - Configuration Tag".
6. Click on Tag Configuration and choose Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration.
7. Paste your Measurement ID into the required field. You can leave the other settings as they are for now.
8. Click on Triggering and select the All Pages trigger. This tells GTM to fire the GA4 tag on every page of your site.
9. Save your tag, then click the blue Submit button in the top right of GTM to publish your changes.

Method B: Using a CMS Platform or Plugin (e.g., Shopify, WordPress)

Most modern platforms have a dedicated field for your Google Analytics ID.

• For Shopify: Go to Online Store > Preferences. In the Google Analytics section, you'll see a field where you can paste your "G-" Measurement ID.
• For WordPress: The best way is to use a plugin like "GA Google Analytics," "Site Kit by Google," or the integration settings within your theme. These plugins usually provide a simple field where you can paste your Measurement ID without touching any code.

Method C: Add the Tag Directly to Your Site's Code

If you don't use GTM or a CMS, you'll need to add the GA4 snippet directly to your site's code.

1. In your GA4 Data Stream settings, find the "View tag instructions" button.
2. Click the "Install manually" tab.
3. You'll see a block of JavaScript code (the global site tag or a gtag.js snippet). Copy this entire code block.
4. Paste it immediately after the <head> tag on every page of your website. If you use a templating system, you'll likely only need to add it to your main header file.

Step 3: Verify Your Data Collection

Don't just assume it's working! It's easy to check if your data is flowing correctly.

1. In your GA4 property, navigate to Reports > Realtime.
2. Open your website in a separate browser tab or on your phone and click around a few pages.
3. Within 30-60 seconds, you should see yourself appear as a user on the Realtime report map and your page views register in the event cards. If you see activity, your tag is installed correctly!

Step 4: Recreate Your Key Conversions

This is where your pre-migration checklist comes in handy. In GA4, goals are now called "conversions." A conversion is simply any event you tell Google is important to your business. Let's say one of your key goals in UA was a "Thank You" page visit after someone filled out a contact form.

Here’s how simply you can set that up in GA4:

1. Go to Admin > Events in your GA4 property.
2. Click Create event. You technically don't need to do this for a simple page view, but it keeps your events cleanly named. We’ll skip creating a custom event name for now to keep things simple for a core conversion like a form submission.
3. Navigate to Admin > Conversions.
4. Click New conversion event.
5. In the "New event name" field, type the name of the event exactly as GA4 records it. A visit to a page, a page_view, is perfectly fine. Enter page_view. Click Save.
6. You’ve just set a page_view as a conversion, but now you need to narrow that down to a specific page - your "thank you" page.
7. To do that, go to Admin -> Events -> Create Event. Give your custom event a name, such as contact_form_submission. Under the Matching conditions section, set event_name equals page_view and page_location contains /thank-you. This specifies the event is a page_view that contains your thank you page’s URL path.

Now, whenever someone visits a page with "/thank-you" in the URL, GA4 will not only record a page_view event but also your new contact_form_submission, which the platform understands is a key conversion for you.

You’ve Switched! Now What? Key Next Steps

Getting your tag installed and data flowing is the biggest hurdle. Once you've done that, here are a few critical housekeeping tasks to take care of.

1. Archive Your Old Universal Analytics Data

This is important: GA4 does not import your historical data from Universal Analytics. Your GA4 property starts from zero on the day you install the tag. You need to export your old data if you want to reference it for year-over-year comparisons in the future.

You can do this by exporting key reports from UA to Google Sheets, CSV files, or by plugging your UA data into a visualization tool like Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio).

2. Increase Your Data Retention Settings

By default, GA4 only stores granular, user-level data (like the data used in the Explore reports) for two months. You should change this immediately.

• Go to Admin > Data Settings > Data Retention.
• Use the dropdown menu under "Event data retention" to change the setting from "2 months" to "14 months".
• Click Save.

3. Link Google Ads, Search Console, and Other Products

To get the most out of GA4, connect it to your other Google services. This allows data to flow between the platforms, unlocking more powerful reports and advertising capabilities.

Navigate to Admin > Product Links to connect your Google Ads, Merchant Center, and Google Search Console accounts. The process is straightforward and usually just takes a few clicks to authorize.

Final Thoughts

Making the move to GA4 is essential for anyone who relies on data to understand their audience and grow their business. While the new interface and event-based model can feel different, breaking down the process into fundamentals - setup, tagging, and conversion configuration - makes it entirely manageable. You've now established a modern analytics foundation that will serve you well into the future.

Of course, getting the data into GA4 is just the first step, the next is turning that data into actionable insights without spending hours deciphering complex reports. Often, you just want a quick, clear answer to a business question. We built Graphed to solve this very problem. By connecting your Google Analytics account, you can use simple, natural language - like "Show me my top traffic sources that led to conversions last month" - to instantly build real-time dashboards and get answers, letting you focus on strategy instead of struggling with report builders.