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THOUGHTS / BEGINNERS GUIDE 6 Oct 2025 8 MIN READ

What Is Google Analytics 4? A Beginner's Guide to Website Statistics

Most small business owners know they should have some idea of what their website is doing — how many people visit, which pages they read, where they came from. Far fewer actually look at this information regularly, usually because the tools involved feel more complicated than they are worth. Google Analytics 4 is the free tool Google provides for this purpose, and what it can tell you, once you learn to read it, tends to be more useful than most people expect.

Google Analytics 4 is Google's free website statistics tool. It shows you how many people visit your website, which pages are most popular, how visitors find you (Google search, social media, direct links), what device they use, and how long they stay. For a small business, the most important numbers are: total visitors over a period of time, which pages people view most, and where your traffic is coming from. GA4 replaced the previous version (Universal Analytics) in July 2023 — if you were using Google Analytics before that date and have not yet migrated to GA4, your old data is no longer being collected. Setting up GA4 is free and takes about 20 minutes. You will need to add a small tracking code to your website and create a free Google Analytics account.

Most small business owners know they should be looking at their website statistics, but many find analytics dashboards overwhelming. GA4 in particular introduced a new interface in 2023 that confused people who were used to the old version. The good news is that you do not need to understand every number — just a handful of metrics give you a useful picture of how your website is performing.

Why Website Statistics Matter for a Small Business

Without analytics, you are running your website blind. You do not know whether your homepage is working, which services page people find most useful, or whether anyone is actually clicking the "contact us" button. Analytics change that. A few specific things that become visible once you have tracking set up:

  • Which pages are getting visitors and which are being ignored — useful for deciding where to focus your content effort.
  • Where your visitors are coming from — Google search, social media, direct visits, or links from other websites.
  • How many people visit and then leave immediately ("bounce rate") versus those who read multiple pages.
  • Whether a piece of content you published or a marketing campaign you ran actually drove traffic to your site.
  • Which devices your visitors use — if 70% of your visitors are on mobile phones and your site does not work well on mobile, that is an urgent problem.

The Key Numbers in Plain English

GA4 uses slightly different terminology from the old Google Analytics. Here are the most important metrics and what they mean:

  • Users. The number of individual people who visited your website in a given period. This is your headline traffic number. "28-day users" means how many unique visitors you had in the last 28 days.
  • Sessions. The number of times people visited your site. One user can have multiple sessions if they visit on different days. Sessions are typically higher than users.
  • Engaged sessions. GA4's version of "meaningful visits" — sessions where the visitor spent at least 10 seconds on the site, viewed at least two pages, or completed a conversion event. This is more useful than the raw session count because it filters out instant departures.
  • Engagement rate. The percentage of sessions that were "engaged" by the definition above. A higher engagement rate means more visitors are actually reading and interacting with your content rather than immediately leaving. Anything above 50% is generally healthy for a small business site.
  • Average engagement time. How long, on average, a visitor spends actively using your website — scrolling, clicking, reading. A few minutes per visit for a services website is a positive sign.
  • Traffic channels. Where your visitors came from. "Organic search" means they found you via Google (the most valuable channel for most small businesses). "Direct" means they typed your URL directly. "Referral" means they clicked a link on another website. "Social" means they came from social media.
  • Top pages. Which individual pages received the most visitors. This tells you what content people are actually finding and reading.

The Numbers That Matter Most for a Small Business

You do not need to check GA4 every day or understand every metric. For a small business, a monthly review of three or four key numbers is enough:

  • Monthly users — is your traffic growing, holding steady, or declining? Compare the same period month-on-month (e.g., May 2026 vs May 2025) rather than month-to-month, because many businesses have seasonal patterns.
  • Organic search traffic — how much of your traffic comes from Google? If this is low, it may suggest your SEO needs attention. If it is growing, your content and search optimisation efforts are working.
  • Top pages — which pages are people actually finding? If people are landing on pages other than your homepage, that is useful information. If a service page gets no traffic, it may not be ranking on Google or may need more content.
  • Device breakdown — what proportion of visitors use mobile phones? If it is more than 50% (common for most small business sites), your mobile experience is especially important.

How to Set Up Google Analytics 4

Setting up GA4 is free and does not require coding knowledge, though you will need access to your website to add a small piece of code:

  • Step 1. Go to analytics.google.com and sign in with a Google account (or create one). Click "Start measuring" and follow the setup flow to create a GA4 property for your website.
  • Step 2. Google will give you a "Measurement ID" — a short code that looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX. You need to add this to your website.
  • Step 3 — Squarespace. Go to Settings → Developer Tools → Google Analytics and paste your Measurement ID.
  • Step 3 — Wix. Go to Marketing Integrations → Google Analytics and connect your account.
  • Step 3 — WordPress. Use a plugin such as "Site Kit by Google" (free) which handles the installation for you, or add the Measurement ID directly to your theme settings.
  • Step 3 — Custom or hand-coded site. Add Google's gtag.js tracking snippet to the <head> section of every page, or ask your web developer to do this. It is a small addition that takes less than five minutes.
  • Step 4. Check that tracking is working by visiting your website and then opening the "Realtime" report in GA4 — you should see yourself appear as an active user within a minute or two.

Once installed, GA4 begins collecting data immediately. You need at least a few weeks of data before the numbers become meaningful.

GA4 and Privacy: What You Need to Tell Visitors

Google Analytics sets cookies on your visitors' devices to track their behaviour. Under UK GDPR, you are required to inform visitors about this and obtain their consent before the tracking cookies are set. This means you need a cookie consent banner — the bar or pop-up that appears when someone first visits your site asking them to accept or decline analytics cookies.

If you are on Squarespace or Wix, these platforms have built-in cookie consent tools. For WordPress and custom websites, a plugin such as CookieYes or Cookiebot handles this cleanly. If you have Google Analytics installed but no cookie consent mechanism, you are not compliant with UK GDPR — which is worth fixing.

Does GA4 Work Alongside Google Search Console?

Yes, and it is worth having both. They are separate tools that tell you different things:

  • Google Analytics 4 tells you what happens on your website — who visits, what they do, how long they stay, where they came from.
  • Google Search Console tells you how your website appears in Google search — which search terms people use to find you, how often your pages appear in results, and which pages Google has indexed.

You can link the two accounts in GA4 settings to see search query data alongside your visitor behaviour data, which gives you a fuller picture of your website's performance in Google.

Frequently asked

Is Google Analytics 4 free?
Yes, Google Analytics 4 is completely free for standard use. There is a paid version called Google Analytics 360 aimed at large enterprises, but for a small business website the free version has everything you need. The only cost is the time it takes to set it up and the requirement to add a cookie consent banner to your website if you do not already have one.
What happened to the old Google Analytics?
The previous version, called Universal Analytics (or "Google Analytics 3"), stopped collecting new data in July 2023. Google stopped processing hits sent to Universal Analytics properties at that point. If you were using the old version and did not migrate to GA4 before July 2023, there is a gap in your data from that point onwards. The historical data from Universal Analytics is still accessible in the old interface, but you can no longer add to it. Going forward, GA4 is the only version of Google Analytics available.
How long does it take to see useful data in GA4?
GA4 starts collecting data from the moment it is installed, but you need at least two to four weeks of data before the numbers become meaningful. Monthly comparisons (this month vs last month, or this month vs the same month last year) are more useful than looking at a single week. If your website gets a small number of visitors, give it two to three months before drawing any conclusions — very small sample sizes make the percentages misleading.
Can I see which specific people visited my website?
No. Google Analytics shows you aggregated, anonymised data about your visitors as a group — how many people visited, which pages they looked at, what devices they used — but it does not identify individual users by name, email address, or any other personal detail. This is by design and is part of what keeps GA4 compliant with privacy regulations. You cannot use GA4 to find out that a specific named person visited your pricing page, for example.

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