The usual picture: GA4 is installed, the traffic chart draws itself, and nobody can answer "how many enquiries did advertising produce last month". The cause is always the same — the tag went in, the events never did. Below is the minimum configuration we deploy on every project: which events to create, how to stop losing sources to broken UTM tags, how to link GA4 with Search Console, and what to do about Consent Mode. Roughly two hours, after which the numbers start meaning something.

Start with a list of actions, not with a tag

The most common mistake is starting from installation. Start from a sheet of paper: write down every action after which a visitor turns into money. For a service business that is four to six items, and you already know roughly what each is worth.

• Form submission — the primary event for 90% of service sites. Count the successful server response, not the button click: the click also fires when validation fails.
• Phone or messenger tap — a separate event. If half your enquiries arrive by call or chat and you only measure the form, you are looking at half the business.
• Price list or deck download — a micro-conversion. Not a goal, but an excellent signal for a "warm audience" segment.
• Payment or checkout — with the amount attached, otherwise you cannot calculate channel payback.
• Reaching the end of a long page — a content quality signal, useful for a blog and for conversion work, but not a business goal.

Base GA4 setup in five steps

1. 1

   Create the property and the data stream

   One property per business, not per website. If you have a site and a future app, that is two streams inside one property, and the data stitches together on its own.

2. 2

   Install the tag exactly once

   The most frequent breakage we find in audits is a GA4 tag sitting both in the theme code and in Tag Manager. The result: duplicated pageviews, a bounce rate near zero, corrupted history. Pick one place and remove the other.

3. 3

   Change data retention to 14 months

   By default GA4 keeps user and event data for two months, so you will never compare this December with last December — the data is already gone. The setting lives in the admin under data retention. Switch it on day one.

4. 4

   Exclude internal traffic

   Your own visits, contractor visits and admin work easily account for 10–20% of fake traffic on a small site. Add an IP filter, then remember to move it from "testing" to "active" — almost everyone forgets that second step.

5. 5

   Mark your key events

   An event on its own means nothing to the conversion reports. In GA4 you must explicitly mark it as a key event; only then does it appear in attribution reports and become importable into ad platforms.

Events and key events: what to create and what to skip

GA4 collects basic events by itself — pageviews, 90% scroll, outbound clicks. That is enough to see traffic and nowhere near enough to see revenue. Everything else you send yourself.

The cleanest moment to fire the event is when the server confirms the submission. Always pass an approximate lead value — without it GA4 shows you a count of conversions but never which channel brings the more valuable clients.

// fire on a successful server response, not on the click
gtag('event', 'generate_lead', {
  form_id: 'contact_main',      // which form, if you have several
  lead_type: 'website_project', // request type, for segmentation
  value: 1500,                  // approximate lead value
  currency: 'USD',
});

UTM tags: why a third of your traffic lives in (direct)

A large direct / none block in the acquisition report almost never means people are typing your domain from memory. It means lost tags: an untagged newsletter link, a jump from a messenger, a redirect that stripped the parameters, a link inside a PDF. Discipline here pays off more than any sophisticated analytics feature.

https://example.com/services/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring_offer&utm_content=button_top

Search Console, the link-up and Consent Mode

GA4 tells you what people did on the site. Search Console tells you which queries put you in front of them and how often they chose not to click. Two halves of one picture: once linked, GA4 gains a report that shows queries alongside on-site behaviour.

• Verify the whole domain, not a single address. A domain property collects http, https, www and every subdomain at once. A URL-prefix property will miss half your data.
• Submit the sitemap immediately. Without it, new pages take weeks rather than days to get indexed.
• Check the indexing report monthly. Pages that dropped out of the index earn zero traffic and Google will not warn you — how to read those reports is covered in our Search Console guide.
• Expect the numbers to disagree. Search Console clicks and GA4 sessions never match: different counting methods and different time zones. Up to 15% divergence is normal; more than that is worth investigating.

Then there is consent. If you have European visitors, your tags need to know what they chose in the cookie banner. Consent Mode handles this by loading the tags either way: before consent they run in a cookieless mode, and after consent they backfill.

// must run BEFORE the GA4 tags load
gtag('consent', 'default', {
  ad_storage: 'denied',
  analytics_storage: 'denied',
  ad_user_data: 'denied',
  ad_personalization: 'denied',
  wait_for_update: 500,
});
// after the visitor accepts in the banner
gtag('consent', 'update', { analytics_storage: 'granted' });

The last step, which few teams take: follow the lead to the end of the funnel. GA4 sees it up to the form submission; after that it lives in your CRM. Push deal statuses back and "20 enquiries from advertising" becomes "20 enquiries, 3 closed for $4,200". The plumbing is covered in our piece on CRM integration.

Frequently asked questions about analytics setup

In short

• Start from the list of actions that make money, not from installing code. Six events cover a small business.
• On day one, switch data retention from two months to fourteen and exclude internal traffic — otherwise there will be nothing to compare against a year from now.
• The GA4 tag must exist in exactly one place. A double install corrupts everything and is rarely noticed immediately.
• Disciplined UTM tagging returns the third of your traffic currently sitting in direct.
• Linking Search Console and pushing deal statuses back from your CRM turn enquiry counts into cost per client by channel.