Course description

Google Analytics 4 can tell you where your website visitors come from, what they look at and whether they book, buy or get in touch. But it's easy to end up with a property nobody controls, a cookie banner that doesn't follow the law, reports full of numbers nobody trusts and no clear answer to the question that matters: is the website doing its job? This course takes you from the first settings to a one-page monthly report that people actually read.

It's a full course, not a quick tour. There are 10 sections and 50 written lessons, and every lesson ends with a practical task for your own website. You follow Drita, a marketing assistant at a climbing centre in Bedford, through her first six months with GA4: taking control of the account, fixing the time zone, choosing the consent route and a fair banner, measuring bookings and enquiries from thank-you pages, tagging newsletter links, and finally answering her manager's question with honest evidence. Every section has a worksheet, model answers, a cheat sheet and practice files, including fictional report exports to work with, a measurement plan, a campaign link builder and a monthly report template.

What you'll learn

• Getting started: what GA4 can and can't tell you, how it counts events, users and sessions, how accounts and properties fit together, and a measurement plan for your own site.
• Setting up properly: creating a property, adding a web data stream and the Google tag, checking data arrives, and the settings to fix on day one: data retention, internal traffic and access.
• Consent, privacy and the law: UK GDPR and PECR in plain English, the analytics exception, cookie banners that follow the ICO's guidance, Consent Mode, privacy settings and your privacy notice.
• Finding your way round: Home, the Reports snapshot, date ranges and fair comparisons, dimensions and metrics, table tools, downloads and a monthly collection of your own.
• Where visitors come from: user and traffic acquisition, what each channel means, source and medium, tagging campaign links properly and linking Search Console.
• What visitors do: pages, landing pages, engagement, the Events report, and devices and locations.
• Key events: choosing the actions that matter, creating events from thank-you pages without code, phone clicks and forms, and checking shop purchases against your own records.
• Explorations and audiences: free-form, funnel and path explorations, segments and comparisons, and audiences with the consent questions they raise.
• Reporting and decisions: a one-page monthly report, annotations and a change log, why the numbers never match, judging website changes fairly, and evidence GA4 can't see.

Who it's for

Website owners, marketing assistants and anyone in a small UK organisation who has been handed GA4 and wants to understand it. You don't need any analytics experience. Consent is built in throughout, in line with the guidance of the Information Commission (still known as the ICO), and the course gives general information, not legal advice. It doesn't teach search engine optimisation or how to build a website: it shows you how to measure what your site does. It ends with a final project: auditing and analysing a fictional online fabric shop's set-up, then writing your own measurement plan and first monthly report.

What will I learn?

• Write a measurement plan that links your website's key actions to the decisions they help with
• Set up or tidy a GA4 property: account control, time zone, data stream, Google tag, data retention, internal traffic and access
• Decide between consent and the analytics exception, check a cookie banner against the ICO's guidance and understand Consent Mode
• Find your way round GA4's reports, compare periods fairly and choose the right dimensions and metrics for a question
• Explain where visitors come from using channels, source and medium, tagged campaign links and Search Console
• Create and mark key events from thank-you pages, measure enquiries and phone clicks properly, and check shop purchases
• Use funnel and path explorations, segments and audiences to answer specific questions
• Produce an honest one-page monthly report, keep a change log, explain mismatched numbers and judge website changes fairly

Frequently asked questions