Updated 1st November 2026. First published in 2023.
Google Analytics runs on 46.9% of all websites, according to W3Techs, which makes it by far the most used analytics tool.
Most of those installations aren't set up properly. When we audit a new client's Google Analytics 4 account, we almost always find the same problems. Enquiries aren't tracked, spam inflates the traffic, and the data disappears after two months.
We're not immune either.
When I recently reviewed our own account for blumint.co, I found that our Squarespace contact forms weren't registering as enquiries, and that referral spam from a site called trafficheap was distorting our traffic reports. This guide covers how to avoid both, along with everything else a beginner needs to set up GA4 properly and read it with confidence.
What happened to Universal Analytics?
When I first wrote this article, businesses were deciding when to move from Universal Analytics to GA4. That decision has been made for them. Standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data on 1st July 2023, and Google deleted all remaining Universal Analytics data from the week of 1st July 2024. If you didn't export your old data before then, it's gone.
GA4 works differently from the tool many marketers grew up with, which is why so many accounts end up misconfigured.
| Universal Analytics | Google Analytics 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Data model | Sessions and pageviews | Events, with every action recorded as an event |
| Goals | Goals and conversions | Key events, imported into Google Ads as conversions |
| Engagement | Bounce rate | Engagement rate and engaged sessions |
| Website and app | Separate properties | One property for both |
| Data retention | Kept indefinitely by default | Two months by default, 14 months at most |
| Status | Shut down, data deleted in 2024 | The current version |
Set up GA4 properly from day one
These are the mistakes we find most often in new client accounts, and every one of them is quick to fix.
Data retention left at two months. GA4 keeps detailed event data for two months unless you change it. Go to Admin, then Data retention, and set it to 14 months, or your custom reports will lose anything older than 60 days.
Payment providers and your own domains counted as referrals. If customers pay through Stripe or PayPal, GA4 can credit the sale to the payment provider instead of the channel that brought them. Add these domains to the list of unwanted referrals in your data stream settings.
Internal traffic left in. Your team, developers and the client's own staff all inflate the numbers. Define internal traffic and switch on the filter.
Cross-domain tracking missing. If your booking system or shop runs on a different domain, configure cross-domain tracking, or GA4 treats every handover as a new visit.
Custom events with nothing to report on. If you send extra details with an event, such as which form someone used, register them as custom dimensions, or GA4 collects them without ever showing them.
No BigQuery export. The BigQuery export is free to set up for standard properties, BigQuery's free monthly allowance covers most small sites, and it keeps a permanent copy of your raw data beyond GA4's 14-month limit. We switch it on for every client on day one, even if they don't need it yet.
If you're launching a new site, set all of this up before you go live, alongside Search Console and your advertising tags, as I explain in our website tips for entrepreneurs.
Track enquiries and sales as key events
Visitors only matter if some of them become customers. In March 2024, Google renamed conversions in GA4 to key events. A key event is any action you mark as important, such as a form submission, a booking or a purchase. When you import a key event into Google Ads to measure campaigns, Google Ads calls it a conversion.
Without key events, you can see how many people visited, with no way of knowing which pages, channels or campaigns brought in enquiries. That was exactly our problem on blumint.co.
Why Squarespace forms often don't track, and how to fix it
GA4 includes an automatic setting called enhanced measurement, which tries to detect form submissions on its own. It doesn't do this reliably. Optimize Smart found that GA4 records form submissions even when nobody submits a form, and Squarespace forms, which load in the background, make the problem worse. You end up with either no enquiries or far too many.
The most reliable fix needs no coding.
Turn off automatic form tracking. Go to Admin, then Data streams, open your stream, click the settings icon under enhanced measurement and switch off form interactions.
Send people to a thank-you page. In each Squarespace form's settings, choose to redirect after submission to a page such as /thank-you, and hide that page from search engines.
Create an event for that page. In GA4, go to Admin, then Events, and create an event called generate_lead that fires when event_name equals page_view and page_location contains /thank-you.
Mark it as a key event. Find generate_lead in your events list and switch it on as a key event.
If you have several forms, add a label to each redirect, such as /thank-you?form=contact, so you can tell them apart. If you'd rather keep Squarespace's built-in thank-you message, Google Tag Manager can fire the event when that message appears, although it takes more set-up and testing.
The reports worth checking each week
GA4 has dozens of reports, and most business owners only need four. These are the ones we check for clients.
| Report | Where to find it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic acquisition | Reports, then Acquisition | Which channels bring visitors, from organic search to paid ads, social and referrals |
| Pages and screens | Reports, then Engagement | Which pages hold attention and which lead to enquiries |
| Key events | Reports, then Engagement | How many enquiries, bookings or sales you got, by channel and landing page |
| Realtime | Reports, then Realtime | Who is on the site now, which is mainly useful for checking new tracking works |
Most of our clients never log in to GA4 itself.
Its menus confuse most business owners, so we build Looker Studio dashboards that show the same figures in one clear view. For larger, high-traffic clients, we connect those dashboards to BigQuery instead of GA4 directly, which avoids the errors Looker Studio throws when it hits Google's data limits.
Clean out spam and bot traffic
GA4 automatically excludes traffic from known bots, although plenty still gets through. Referral spam is the most common kind. Fake sites send hits to your property so their name shows up in your reports, hoping you'll visit them. On our own site, trafficheap appeared as a referral source, inflating sessions with visits that never engaged.
To find it, open the Explore section, add session source and hostname as dimensions, and look for sources with high sessions and almost no engagement time, or hostnames that aren't your domain. GA4 can't delete spam that has already arrived, so exclude those sources with a comparison or segment when you report. Never visit the spam sites themselves.
Treat sudden spikes with suspicion, whatever tool you use. Rank trackers have the same problem this year with poisoned SERPs, so always check a sudden change against a second source before acting on it.
See how much traffic comes from ChatGPT and other AI tools
AI tools now send real visitors. Demandbase found that ChatGPT referrals to B2B websites rose 303% in a year, from around 645,000 visits a month in June 2025 to 2.6 million in June 2026. GA4 lumps these visits in with ordinary referrals, so you need to separate them yourself.
Create a channel group. Go to Admin, then Channel groups, copy the default group and add a new channel called AI assistants.
Set the rule. Choose session source, matches regex, and paste .*chatgpt\.com.*|.*openai\.com.*|.*perplexity\.ai.*|.*gemini\.google\.com.*|.*copilot\.microsoft\.com.*|.*claude\.ai.*
Move it above Referral. GA4 applies channel rules from top to bottom, so the AI channel has to come first.
Check the result. In the traffic acquisition report, switch the channel dimension to your new group to see AI visits alongside your other channels.
This still misses a lot.
Clicks from Google's AI Overviews count as ordinary organic search, links opened from AI mobile apps often lose their source and show up as direct traffic, and many people read an AI answer without clicking at all. That's why we track AI citations as well as visits, as I explain in our guide to AI citation tracking, and ChatGPT now runs its own search index, so this channel will only grow.
Consent mode and data in Europe
In the European Economic Area, you need consent before GA4 can use cookies, and Google requires advertisers to pass consent signals through consent mode. Everyone who rejects your cookie banner disappears from your standard reports, so European clients see noticeably fewer visitors and enquiries in GA4 than actually happen.
Google can fill some of the gap with modelled data, although only for larger sites. A property needs at least 1,000 events a day from users who declined consent for at least seven days, and at least 1,000 daily users who accepted on at least seven of the previous 28 days. Most small and mid-sized businesses never reach that, so the gap stays.
For European clients, we treat GA4 as a guide to trends, not an exact count. Your CRM, shop or booking system remains the real record of leads and sales. Our article on GDPR and content marketing in Europe covers the wider rules.
GA4 or a privacy-first alternative?
Clients in Germany, Austria and Switzerland often ask whether they should drop Google Analytics for a privacy-first tool. Very few businesses do. GA4's share dwarfs every alternative.
Which analytics tools websites use
Share of all websites using each tool, October 2026
Source: W3Techs traffic analysis tools survey, 21st October 2026.
Our advice depends on how the business wins customers.
| Tool | Cookie banner needed? | Strengths | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| GA4 | Yes, in Europe | Free, deep reporting, feeds Google Ads bidding | Businesses running Google Ads |
| Plausible | No, it works without cookies | Simple one-page dashboard, hosted in the EU | Content and SEO-led sites that want simple, compliant numbers |
| Matomo | By default, although it can run without cookies | Close to GA4 in features, and you can host it yourself | Organisations that want full ownership of their data |
If you spend heavily on Google Ads, stay on GA4, because Google's automated bidding relies on its conversion data. Tighten the privacy settings, block it behind a strict consent banner and shorten data retention. If you grow mainly through SEO, content and referrals, a privacy-first tool can make sense, and some DACH clients run both, with a cookieless tool counting all traffic and GA4 firing only for visitors who consent.
Get help with Google Analytics
We've used Google Analytics since it first launched, and we've been through the move to GA4 with our own site and our clients'.
Our Google Analytics audits find and fix the problems in this guide, and good tracking supports everything else we do, from SEO and PPC to social media, content writing and web design. If you're building or rebuilding a site, our guide to the anatomy of a webpage shows what each page needs to convert.
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No. Standard Universal Analytics stopped processing data on 1st July 2023, and Google deleted all remaining Universal Analytics data from the week of 1st July 2024. Google Analytics 4 is the only version now.
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Key events are the actions you mark as important in GA4, such as form submissions, bookings or purchases. Google renamed them from conversions in March 2024. When you import a key event into Google Ads, it counts there as a conversion.
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GA4's automatic form tracking is unreliable, especially with Squarespace forms. Switch off form interactions in enhanced measurement, redirect each form to a thank-you page and create a key event that fires when someone reaches that page.
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Create a custom channel group with a rule that matches AI sources such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com, and place it above Referral. Clicks from Google's AI Overviews still appear as organic search.