How to Use Google Analytics: What to Do in Your First Hour

Six defaults to change before anything else

1. Data retention, which defaults to two months

Admin, Data settings, Data retention.

GA4 keeps user-level and event-level data for two months by default. Change it to 14 months, which is the maximum on the free tier.

This one is urgent because it is not retroactive. Data already deleted is gone. Six months from now, when you want to compare this quarter against the same quarter last year, you will find out that you cannot, and there is no fix at that point.

Change it today. It is one dropdown.

2. Internal traffic, which is counting you

Admin, Data streams, your stream, Configure tag settings, Define internal traffic.

Add your office IP, your home IP, and any address your team works from. Then go to Data filters and switch the internal traffic filter from Testing to Active, because it starts as testing and does nothing until you do.

For a site doing 1,000 visits a month, a team of four reloading pages all day is a large percentage of your data. Every conclusion you draw includes your own behavior until you fix this.

3. Referral exclusions, which scramble attribution

Admin, Data streams, your stream, Configure tag settings, List unwanted referrals.

Add your payment processor (Stripe, PayPal, Square), any booking system on a different domain, and any auth provider your users pass through.

Without this, a customer who goes to PayPal and comes back is recorded as a brand new session referred by paypal.com. Your real acquisition channel loses the conversion, and PayPal gets credit for your sales.

4. Key events, which GA4 does not know

Admin, Events, then toggle Mark as key event on the ones that matter.

GA4 collects a lot automatically and has no idea which of it represents money for you. A form submission, a phone tap, a booking. Until you mark them, every report treats a bounce and a lead as equally interesting.

5. Enhanced measurement, which you should check rather than trust

Admin, Data streams, your stream, Enhanced measurement.

This is on by default and it automatically tracks scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement and file downloads. Mostly good. The one to look at is site search, which only works if your search results page uses a query parameter GA4 recognizes. If yours uses something custom, add it, because site search data is the most direct list of what your visitors wanted and could not find.

6. Google Search Console, which is not connected

Admin, Product links, Search Console links.

Two separate free tools that only talk to each other if you tell them to. Search Console knows what people searched to find you. GA4 knows what they did next. Linked, you can see which queries produce engaged visits instead of just clicks.

Now, the four reports that matter

You do not need most of GA4. For a small business, four reports answer nearly every real question.

Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition. Where visitors come from, grouped by channel. This is the "is my marketing working" report. Switch the dimension to Session source / medium for the detailed view. We go deeper on reading this one in how to track website traffic.

Reports, Engagement, Landing page. Which page people arrived on. This is more useful than the pages report, because it tells you what is doing the work of bringing people in rather than what they clicked once they were already there.

Reports, Engagement, Events, filtered to your key events. Did anybody do the thing you care about, and where did they come from.

Engagement rate, which appears as a column in most reports. GA4 counts a session as engaged if it lasts more than ten seconds, fires a key event, or reaches two or more pages. This replaced bounce rate as the primary signal, and it is the better metric because it measures something happening rather than something not happening.

For the full inventory of what each GA4 report section contains, see what GA4 reports actually show you.

How to actually read it without fooling yourself

Three habits separate people who use analytics from people who look at it.

Compare, never look at a single number. 400 sessions means nothing. 400 sessions against 250 last month means something. Turn on the comparison date range every time and make the previous period visible.

Segment before concluding. A site-wide engagement rate of 45% tells you nothing about whether your marketing works. The same number split by channel usually shows one channel dragging the average down, and that is the actionable version.

Follow one question at a time. Open GA4 with a question already in your head: why did leads drop last month, which page loses people, does the newsletter bring anybody back. Browsing dashboards without a question is how an hour disappears and nothing changes.

The mistake that makes all of this useless

If most of your traffic is showing up as (direct) / (none), stop and fix that before you draw a single conclusion.

Direct is supposed to mean somebody typed your URL. In practice it collects every visit where the referrer got lost: untagged email links, links opened from apps, PDFs, QR codes on printed material. We regularly see accounts where 40% of traffic sits in Direct and almost none of it was direct.

The fix is tagging every link you control, which takes about thirty minutes once you have a naming convention. Our guide to UTM parameters has ours.

Until that is done, your channel report is fiction, and every decision you make from it is a coin flip with extra steps.

Common questions

Is Google Analytics free?

Yes, for any volume a small or mid-sized business produces. The paid tier, Analytics 360, is priced for enterprises hitting data limits and starts in the tens of thousands per year.

How long does GA4 take to show data?

Realtime shows activity within seconds. Standard reports take 24 to 48 hours to process fully, so a report that looks empty on day one is usually fine. Do not judge a fresh install until the second day.

Why is my traffic showing as direct?

Because the referrer was lost. Untagged campaign links are the biggest cause, followed by app links, PDFs and QR codes. If Direct is above roughly 20% of your total, treat it as a tagging problem rather than an audience insight.

What is a good engagement rate?

There is no universal benchmark worth quoting, and any article giving you one is usually recycling Universal Analytics bounce rate data that is not comparable to GA4. Use your own site median as the benchmark and watch the difference between channels. A channel well below your own median is the finding.

Do I need GA4 if I already have Search Console?

Yes, they answer different questions. Search Console covers what happens in Google search results, up to the click. GA4 covers everything after the click. Neither replaces the other, and linking them is more useful than either alone.

Should I install GA4 directly or through Tag Manager?

Directly is fine if GA4 is the only script you will ever run. Through Google Tag Manager if you expect to add ad pixels, conversion tracking or event tracking later, because then every future change stops being a code deploy. If the tag is already hardcoded on your site, moving your analytics tag into a container is its own job with real risk of losing data mid-transition.

What to do next week

Set a recurring thirty minutes, once a month. Open the four reports above with the comparison period on, and write down one thing you learned and one thing you will change.

That habit beats any dashboard. Most businesses we work with do not have an analytics problem, they have a nobody-looks-at-it problem, and the tool cannot fix that.

We audit GA4 configurations regularly as part of our SEO service in Hialeah and it takes about an hour. The settings above are the first six things we check, and it is unusual to find an account where all six are right.

Written by J Raydel Sanchez, Founder and CEO of tamer, a digital marketing agency in Hialeah, Florida. Menu paths verified in GA4 as of August 2026; Google moves these occasionally.