What is Google Analytics 4: setup and the first 10 reports
What Google Analytics 4 is, how to set it up and which 10 reports to open in the first week: account, property, data stream, events, key events, reading order.
By Roozbeh Nazari · CEO
Let us start the question "what is Google Analytics 4" with Google's own definition: the analytics platform that collects website and app data in the same property, on an event-based model, and describes the customer journey through those events. Since Universal Analytics stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, Google Analytics 4 has been the only Google version of free web analytics. This article does two jobs: first it walks through setup in the order of Google's help document, with the decisions that must not be skipped; then it lists the ten reports to open in the first week, each with the question it answers. We covered locale-based funnel reading on multilingual sites separately in GA4 reporting for multilingual sites; this is the starting point.
What Google Analytics is, and what changed with GA4
The answer to "what is Google Analytics" has been the same for years: the tool that measures who comes to your site, where they come from and what they do. What changed is the data model. The old version was built on sessions and pageviews; everything revolved around "how many pages did a visitor see in one session". Google Analytics 4 records every interaction as an event: a pageview, a form submission, a scroll and a file download are all events, and every event carries parameters. The practical consequence of this model is a shift from "which channel brought how many sessions" to "which channel produced which useful event". The second difference is the reporting interface: standard reports were simplified and the depth moved to explorations, so not finding a table you were used to in the old version does not mean the data is missing; it means you build it in an exploration.
Setup: account, property, data stream, tag
Google's setup document describes four steps, and the order matters. The first is the account, created at analytics.google.com; the account represents the company, and several sites can sit under one account. The second is the property: property name, reporting time zone and currency are chosen here. Time zone and currency can be changed later, but historical data is not recalculated; for the Turkish market that is Europe/Istanbul and TRY, and for a site aimed at international patients or customers the choice follows who the report is for. The third is the data stream: web, iOS or Android; for web you enter the site address, and if enhanced measurement stays on, scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement and file downloads are collected automatically. The fourth is placing the tag on the site: entering the tag ID into the CMS, adding the tag to the HTML by hand, or publishing it through Google Tag Manager. In our practice the third route is the standard; tag management leaves the development cycle and conversion events are defined without code changes. Google's document says data collection may take up to 30 minutes to begin; the first verification is done in the Realtime report.
The real answer to what Google Analytics 4 is: events and key events
Where setup ends, the work begins. The real answer to what Google Analytics 4 is lies in event design: on top of the automatically collected events, you define the events specific to your business. Google's list of recommended events is the starting point; for a lead-focused site, generate_lead and qualify_lead, and for e-commerce, named events such as view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase are recognised as standard both in reports and in integrations with ad platforms. Then you decide which of these events represent a business outcome and mark them as key events: a form submission, a WhatsApp click, an appointment request. The key event flag is required for counting by channel and page in reports, for attribution, and for passing the event to Google Ads as a conversion. The most common setup mistake we see is marking a pageview as a key event, or a button click instead of the "thank you" page; the first counts everything as a conversion, the second counts visitors who never submitted the form.
The 10 reports to open in the first week
The order below was designed for a team reading the data for the first time; each report answers one question. One, Realtime: is the tag working, are key events arriving? Two, Acquisition overview: which channels bring traffic, and what is the share of organic versus paid search? Three, Traffic acquisition: channel and source/medium by session; whether UTM discipline holds shows here. Four, User acquisition: the first-touch channel; where returning users first came from. Five, Pages and screens: which pages are viewed and which produce key events; the list of pages with high traffic and zero events is your first task list. Six, Landing page: the page a visit started on and the engagement it produced; the report an SEO team will use most. Seven, Events: how many times each event fired; whether enhanced measurement is counting something unexpected becomes clear here. Eight, Key events: conversions by channel and page; start with few key events so the report stays readable on one page. Nine, Demographic and tech details: country, language, device and browser; on multilingual sites, a mismatch between country and language is the first sign of a locale problem. Ten, a funnel in Explorations: the drop-off between steps from landing page to key event; the depth you could not find in standard reports lives here.
Three decisions skipped during setup
Three decisions, if not made during setup, make the first reports misleading. Before those, a note: before publishing the tag, clarify how your site's cookie consent mechanism talks to the analytics tag. Whether the tag runs before consent is a joint decision for the legal team and the measurement team; data collected before that decision ends up both incomplete and contested, and every report carries that uncertainty. First, excluding internal traffic and development environments; the team's own visits visibly distort conversion rates on small sites. Second, data retention; the default period limits how far back you can compare in explorations and needs changing under settings. Third, the Search Console link: organic query data appears inside Google Analytics 4 only once the link is made; we explained which Search Console report ties to which decision in the Google Search Console guide. We treat these three decisions and event design as part of setup in our analytics and data service; how to bring the reports into a single management dashboard is shown in Looker Studio SEO dashboard. The first week of Google Analytics 4 is a week for testing the accuracy of measurement rather than the size of the numbers; in a correctly configured property the ten reports agree with each other, and if they do not, the problem is in the setup, not the report.