FreeGoogle Analytics 4About 25 min
Set Up GA4 and Mark Your Key Event
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's free analytics tool. It tells you what visitors do once they land. Most of all, it tells you if they turn into a lead or a sale.
Why this matters
Rankings and traffic are only a means to an end. GA4 ties your SEO work to real business results. That is the one number that justifies the whole campaign to you or a client. Traffic that never converts isn't a win.
✓ How to do it
- Go to analytics.google.com and create a new GA4 property for your site.
- Create a Web data stream for your domain (Admin → Data collection and modification → Data streams) and grab the Google tag.
- Install the tag. Paste the snippet into your site's
<head>, or use Google Tag Manager, or your CMS's analytics field. - Visit your own site and check that you show up in the Realtime report. If you do, tracking works.
- Pick your one primary conversion. That could be a form submit, a phone tap, or a purchase.
- Go to Admin → Data display → Events and mark that event as a key event. Key events are what GA4 now calls conversions. If the event hasn't fired yet, use Admin → Data display → Key events → New key event and type its exact name.
- Test it. Complete the action yourself and watch it register in Realtime.
Done whenYour own test visit and a test conversion both show in GA4 Realtime, and the event is marked as a key event.
How we run this step at Clickflame
GA4 goes on every site we launch. About a day after launch we go back into Admin and mark the real events as key events, because an event only shows up in the list after it has fired once. If you skip that return trip, GA4 counts traffic and never counts a lead.
Tips & pitfalls
- Keep one primary key event for clean reporting. Track the rest as secondary.
- GA4 does not track phone taps by itself. In Google Tag Manager, add a GA4 event tag named
phone_clickwith a Just Links click trigger where Click URL starts withtel:, then mark phone_click as a key event. - If you'll ever run Google Ads, link GA4 to it now so data flows both ways.