How to Track Google Analytics

Knowing your Google Analytics data is one thing, but knowing how to track what matters is the game-changer you need to grow your business. Instead of just watching traffic go up and down, you can finally connect user behavior to real results like sales and signups. This guide gives you practical, step-by-step actions to start tracking goals, campaigns, and user actions in Google Analytics 4.

First, Is Your Google Analytics Tracking Code Even Working?

Before you track specific goals, you need to make sure basic tracking is set up correctly. This all starts with your GA4 "Measurement ID," which looks something like G-XXXXXXXXXX. This ID is what connects your website to your Google Analytics property, allowing it to collect data.

Ideally, this tracking code was added to every page of your site during setup, either through a simple plugin, a direct integration like Shopify or Squarespace, or via Google Tag Manager. Here’s a quick way to check if it's firing properly:

1. Install the Google Tag Assistant Companion extension for the Chrome browser.
2. Navigate to your website in a new tab.
3. Click the Tag Assistant extension icon in your browser toolbar.
4. It should detect your Google Analytics tag. If you see your Measurement ID (G-...) in green, you’re good to go. It means GA is receiving data from your site.
5. If you see it in yellow or red, it signals a problem with the installation that needs fixing before you can trust your data.

You can also use the Realtime report in GA4. With your website open in another window, this report should show you as at least one active user. If you see activity, tracking is working.

The Absolute Basics of GA4: Events & Conversions

If you're used to the old Google Analytics (Universal Analytics), you need to think a little differently now. The old model was based on hits, sessions, and pageviews. The new GA4 model is all about events.

An event is any specific user interaction on your website. Seriously, everything is now an event:

• A page_view is an event.
• A session_start is an event.
• A purchase is an event.
• A button click is an event.
• Scrolling down a page is an event.

Some of these events are collected automatically by GA4 without you having to do anything. This feature, called Enhanced Measurement, tracks common actions like clicks to other websites, site search usage, video engagement, and file downloads. You can view or change these settings under Admin > Data Streams > (Your Stream).

So, where do "goals" come in? In GA4, a "goal" is now called a Conversion. A conversion is simply any event that you’ve marked as important to your business. When you tell GA4 that a specific event (like generate_lead or purchase) is a conversion, it gets pulled into special reports and lets you measure your marketing performance more effectively.

How to Track Your First Business Goal as a Conversion

Let's walk through tracking a common goal: a user filling out a contact form and landing on a “thank you” page. This action is a clear sign of a new lead.

Our goal is to create a new event that fires only when someone visits this thank-you page, and then mark that new event as a conversion.

Step 1: Go to the Event Creation Screen

In your GA4 property, navigate to Admin > Events (in the Data Display column). On this screen, click the "Create event" button.

Step 2: Define the Custom Event

Now, you'll tell GA4 the rules for your new event.

• Custom event name: Give it a clear, descriptive name. Use underscores instead of spaces, like thank_you_page_visit.
• Matching conditions: This is where you set the trigger. Create the following two conditions:

1. For the first condition's parameter, select event_name. For the operator, choose "equals". And for the value, enter page_view.
2. Click "Add condition." For the second condition's parameter, select page_location. For the operator, choose "contains". For the value, enter the key part of your thank-you page's URL (e.g., /thank-you/).

Click "Create" in the top right. You've just told GA4: "When a normal page view event happens and the URL of that page contains /thank-you/, lump it into a new, custom event called thank_you_page_visit."

Step 3: Mark Your New Event as a Conversion

It can take up to 24 hours for your new custom event to start showing up in GA4. Once you see thank_you_page_visit appear in your main Events list (Admin > Events), you simply flip the switch next to it in the "Mark as conversion" column.

That's it! From now on, every time a user lands on your confirmation page, it will be counted as a conversion, allowing you to easily see which of your marketing efforts are generating the most leads.

How to Track Marketing Campaign Performance with UTM Parameters

If you're spending money or time on email, social media, or paid ads, you need to know what's working. The best way to track this in Google Analytics is by using UTM parameters.

UTM parameters are simple tags you add to the end of your URLs. They don’t change the page itself, but they give Google Analytics specific information about where the click came from. Here are the three you'll use most often:

• utm_source: The platform where the traffic came from (e.g., facebook, newsletter, google).
• utm_medium: The type of marketing channel (e.g., cpc, social, email).
• utm_campaign: The name of your specific campaign (e.g., summer_sale_2024, june_promo).

Example: Tracking a Newsletter Campaign

Let's say you're linking to your new blog post from your weekly newsletter. Instead of using a plain link like https://www.yourwebsite.com/new-post, you would use a link with UTM tags:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/new-post?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_recap_june

When someone clicks this, GA4 automatically logs that this user came from your "weekly_recap_june" campaign, via the "email" channel, from your "newsletter" source.

Building these URLs manually can be tedious. To make it easier, use Google's free Campaign URL Builder to generate them for you.

Where to Find Campaign Data in GA4

You can see how your campaigns are performing by going to the built-in Traffic Acquisition report. Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

In the main chart, you'll see a dropdown that likely says "Session default channel group". Click it and choose "Session campaign" instead. Now, you can see exactly which campaigns are driving the most traffic, engagement, and - if you've set up conversions - which are performing best.

How to Build Custom Reports to Track Specific User Journeys

Sometimes the standard reports don't answer your exact question. That's what the Explore section in GA4 is for. It lets you build your own custom reports and visualizations from scratch.

Let's say you want to answer the question, "Which marketing channels bring users who view the most pages on my site?" You can’t easily answer that in the standard reports, but you can build a quick Exploration report.

1. Click on "Explore" in the left-hand navigation.
2. Start a new exploration using the "Free form" template.
3. In the "Variables" column on the left, import the data dimensions and metrics you want to use. Click the "+" icon for 'Dimensions' and add 'Session default channel group' and 'Page path'. Then click the "+" for 'Metrics' and add 'Sessions', 'Page path', 'Views', and 'Average view duration'.
4. Drag the dimensions you imported over to the "Rows" or "Columns". Put Session channel group into Rows.
5. Drag your metrics into the "Values" area, like sessions and 'Average engagement time'.
6. This allows you to analyze how individual pages perform by each channel. You can drag 'Page path' into the Rows or Columns section to get more granular details.

The Explore section can feel overwhelming at first, but play with it. It's where you can go beyond basic tracking and really start questioning and understanding user behavior at a deeper level.

Final Thoughts

Figuring out how to track your website's performance is fundamental to making smart marketing decisions. By learning to verify your setup, create conversion events from user actions, and tag your campaigns properly, you're transitioning from guessing what works to knowing what works.

Navigating through different Google Analytics reports can sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. We created Graphed to simplify this whole process. Instead of building manual reports, you can connect your GA4 account and simply ask a question – like "show me my top 10 pages by traffic from organic search last month" – and get an instant visualization and a live dashboard without having to hunt for it yourself.