Measurement and analytics
Google Analytics 4 for the business owner: six numbers, and what to ignore
Ilyes Massoudi8 min readThe short answer
Google Analytics 4 is a free tool that records what visitors do inside your site: where they came from, which pages they opened, from which device and country, and whether they clicked WhatsApp or sent a form. Of its hundreds of reports a business owner needs six numbers: sessions by source, conversions (key events) by source, top landing pages, country and city, mobile share, and engagement rate. Everything else, from real-time active users to exploration funnels, is useful to an analyst and a waste of your time. And the condition that cripples most accounts: nobody has defined what a conversion is.
What it is, briefly
Google Analytics 4, known as GA4, is the current generation of Google’s free analytics tool. It works through a small code snippet placed on the site that records every visit: its source, the pages opened, the device, the country, and the actions the visitor takes if you have told it what to record.
The previous generation, Universal Analytics, shut down for good in 2023 and 2024, so an old account that was never migrated stopped collecting data there. The difference that confuses people who migrate: GA4 counts everything as events, and its default reports show engagement rate rather than bounce rate.
Connecting it to your site in ten minutes
- Create an Analytics account and a property at analytics.google.com.
- Add a web data stream with your site’s URL, which gives you a measurement ID starting with G-.
- Place the code on the site: through Google Tag Manager, which is the best route, a WordPress plugin, or the platform settings on Salla, Zid and Shopify where pasting the ID is enough.
- Link Search Console and Google Ads from the property settings.
- Enable the settings that reduce personal data in the data collection settings.
- Define the key events, the most important step, explained in the Tag Manager article.
The six numbers and where to find them
| Number | The question it answers | Where it sits in GA4 |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions by source | Where my visitors come from: Google, Instagram, ads, direct | Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition |
| Key events by source | Which source brings enquiries, not just visits | The same report, key events column |
| Landing pages | Which page visitors enter on first, and which converts | Reports, Engagement, Landing page |
| Country and city | Are my visitors from the markets I sell in | Reports, User, Demographic details |
| Mobile share | How many visitors are on a phone | Reports, User, Tech |
| Engagement rate | Do visitors stay or leave immediately | A column in most reports |
Make these six your monthly report. One page, six numbers, compared with the previous month. For anything else someone asks you for, ask back: which decision changes because of this number?
What you can safely ignore
- Real-time. Entertaining, and worthless for decisions.
- Users versus sessions versus views. Pick sessions and stick to it for monthly comparison.
- Explorations, funnels and paths. Tools for the analyst, not the business owner.
- Interests and age brackets. Weak estimates in the Gulf; build nothing on them.
- Automated insight notifications. Mostly natural fluctuation.
Mistakes I see in Gulf accounts
- The account is installed with not one key event, so the report counts visits and knows nothing of enquiries.
- The Arabic and English versions are not separated, so you cannot tell which language brings enquiries. The fix is a simple dimension on page path or page language.
- The team’s own visits are not excluded, so the numbers look better than they are.
- Referral spam inflating the referral source.
- The code installed twice, counting every visit as two.
- Nobody opens the account at all. The tool does not work by being installed; it works by being asked.
The alternative if GA4 is more than you need
For simpler numbers with no setup: Microsoft Clarity gives sessions, pages and devices with session recordings for free, and Search Console gives everything to do with Google. But counting enquiries by source needs GA4 or an equivalent, and there is no way around that.
Where this sits in the audit
In the audit I ask for read access to Analytics and Search Console if they exist, and put the numbers behind every conclusion in the report itself. If they do not exist I work without them, state in the report what we lost because of that, and send you the steps to set them up as part of delivery.