Shaun Whynacht shows how to set up GA4 tracking after receiving a migration notification. He walks through creating a GA4 property, finding its measurement ID, and installing it via Google Tag Manager by creating a new tag with an All Pages trigger. He recommends keeping your old Universal Analytics tag running alongside GA4 to preserve historical data.
Chapters
Hey guys, now if you have received a notification from Google Analytics that there is a new G4 or GA4 tracking code that gives you, you know, advanced analytics, but you don't know how to install it, that's what I'm going to walk you through here in today's video. Now I'm going to be installing it using Google Tag Manager. If you've not used Google Tag Manager, I will explain to you the point where you could just put the code on your website if your website is WordPress and you have a place to put to put that. So this video I'm going to use Google Tag Manager and I'll explain the differences when we get to that point. So the first thing you need to do is you need to go into your Google Analytics account. Um, so here we are in our Blue Cow Marketing one. Um, and we're just going to go down to the admin settings. Then once we're in here, what we're going to look for is the tracking info section. And we're going to click on tracking code. Now it's going to come up. It's going to show us the existing tracking code. That we had here, and this is how you can confirm first that you don't have the GA4 one. You have this UA tracking code. Okay, so once you see that, then all you need to do is just go over here to the GA4 Setup Assistant. So I'm gonna click on that and we're gonna click on Get Started. We're gonna click Create Property. And then once that property is created, we're gonna say See Your GA4 Property. It's gonna open up another tab for you, and here's where you can go and do the installation of it. Okay, so under the collection here where it says tag installation, just click the little arrow. It's gonna pop up here, and there it is. There's the one that was just created. I'll click the arrow, and then down here under tagging instructions, this is where you can go ahead and click on this global site tag. Okay, now this is where if you're not using Google Tag Manager, you would go here and you would get this code and have installed on the header section of your website. Now, if you're using Google Tag Manager, which we are, we're going to make it a lot easier. So Google Tag Manager in essence is just one script that is loaded on your site. And then within Google Tag Manager, you can have other scripts and trackings fire. So it takes the load off of your website and puts it onto Google Tag Manager for firing all that stuff. You know, when you have a website that has a lot of scripts in the header, multiples, Facebook tracking, um, you know, LinkedIn tracking pixels, Google Analytics, you know, and what other softwares you have, whether you've got chat scripts and all that kind of stuff, it can bog down your site and really slow it down. So let's hop over here to our Google Tag Manager account. And here's our one. And what we're going to do is we're going to create a new tag. So keeping in mind that if you haven't used Google Tag Manager before, there is some setup that needs to be done when you create it, like putting the initial header scripts on your site. So in here I can see that I've got my existing Universal Analytics script. I'm just going to go ahead and click on new and Google's made it a lot easier because you can click on tag configuration and there is a GA4 configuration option here. So we're going to click on that and it's not asking for a script. It's just looking for the measurement ID right here. So let's flip back over to the one we set up and here's our measurement ID, very similarly named. We're going to click on copy. And we'll come back over here and we're going to paste that into the container. Now, in order for the tag to work, you do need to have a trigger. So in this very basic form, we click on trigger. What we're going to do is we're going to choose all pages because you essentially want that tag to fire across your entire website. Then once you do that, up top here, you're going to give it a name. So I'm going to call it Google Analytics GA4, and we'll click save. Now, in this case, I'm just installing this, um, in addition to my Universal Analytics tracking. I'm not 100% sure the tracking, um, will be great, but in order to have that, um, historic tracking, I'm going to keep this one on as well because the loads here in Google Tag Manager, I'm not too worried about it. So I'm going to run both of them at the exact same time. Now we actually have to submit this, and one thing that I always do if I'm not doing a lot of these updates is I just put in the, the date in which I did it. You have to put something in both, and the reason this is here is because you have multiple team members that are publishing stuff. You want to see a history of what the changes that are happening, so it's a great little audit trail. We'll publish that, and just like that, you've got your tracking code installed. So if you like this video, please hit subscribe, like, comment, ask us a question. We would love to hear your feedback and would love to answer your questions. Thanks for watching.
