GA4: Setup Check List

Last update: January 2023

This checklist can used while setting up GA4, or during executing audits.

1. Enable Enhanced Measurements.
Enabled by default. This is something that always needs to be verified during audits.
What is it? > https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9216061?hl=en

2. Verify Time zone for reporting is correct.
This has to be done, during account creation.

3. Setup on-site search settings within Enhanced Measurement.
Enabled by default.
This is something that always needs to be verified during audits.

4. Connect Google Ads.

5. Connect Search Console.

6. Setup BigQuery (if it's needed for your account). > https://support.google.com/analytics/search?q=big+query 

7. Set up correct attribution modelling. > https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10596866?hl=en#zippy=%2Cin-this-article 

8. Cross-Domain Tracking – Add all your domains in the list for cross domain tracking.

9. Ensure that the right GTM Container is used and tracked by GTM trackers.
We have seen accounts using different container on different subdomains or sites that are tracked as one using cross domain tracking.
Having different container makes it difficult to manage the tags, triggers and variables.
So, debugging gets impossible.

10. Enable Google signals data collection to get cross-device and demographic data.

11. Verify Data Retention time period.

12. Define Internal Traffic rules.

13. Exclude Internal Traffic. 

14. Remove Unwanted or spam referrals.

15. Configure session timeout setting, default is 30 mins, but it can be changed. Read more here.

16. Configure Time setting to calculate Engaged Sessions.
How to do that:

Adjust web session timeout
Change the default timeout of 30 minutes for web sessions as follows:
- In the left navigation, click Admin.
- In the Property column, click Data Streams.
- Click Web and then click a web data stream.
- In the web stream details, click Configure tag settings (at the bottom).
- In the Settings section, click Show all to see all available options.
- Click List unwanted referrals.
- Adjust session timeout: set the session timeout in hours and minutes.
- Adjust timer for engaged sessions: select the number of seconds it takes for a session to be considered an engaged session.
- Click Save.

17. Create/enable Conversion events.

18. Add and Verify your Custom Definitions.

19. Add and Verify your Audiences.