Setting up and configuring a GA4 property
The GA4 property is where your data ends up, so a few choices you make in its first ten minutes decide how usable that data is later. This walkthrough creates a property from scratch and configures the handful of settings that are easy now and painful to fix after months of collection. It's the first part of a three-step series: the web GTM container and server GTM container guides pick up where this leaves off.
Create the property
In Google Analytics, open Admin and click Create → Property. Three fields matter here:
- Property name: the site or brand it covers, e.g. "Acme NL".
- Reporting time zone: the zone your days are bucketed in. Pick where your business reports from, not where your visitors are; a mismatch quietly shifts conversions across day boundaries.
- Currency: what revenue is reported in. Conversions from other currencies happen at daily rates.
Time zone and currency can be changed later, but historical data is never re-bucketed, which is exactly why they're worth getting right on day one.
Add a web data stream
After the business questions, GA4 asks for a platform: choose Web, enter your site's URL and a stream name. The stream's Measurement ID (G-XXXXXXX) is the value everything else references; you'll paste it into the Google tag in your web GTM container in the next guide, so keep it at hand.
Decide on enhanced measurement
Each web stream has Enhanced measurement switched on by default: page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, file downloads and form interactions, all collected without tagging work. Leaving it on is fine for most sites, with one caution. If you track any of those same interactions yourself through GTM, switch that specific signal off here (the gear icon on the stream), or every one of them counts twice.
Set data retention to 14 months
Under Admin → Data settings → Data retention, event-level retention defaults to 2 months. Standard reports keep working beyond that, but Explorations (funnels, path analysis, any custom deep dive) only reach as far back as this setting allows. Set it to 14 months now; it only applies to data collected from that moment on, so every week it stays on the default is a week of analysis you permanently give up.
Consent and EU settings
GA4 respects the consent state your site's CMP declares; that's Consent Mode, and it's configured on the site and in GTM rather than in this property. Two property-side settings are worth a deliberate look for an EU audience: Google Signals (Admin → Data collection) enables cross-device features by joining data from signed-in Google users, which many EU teams keep off, and data sharing settings, which you should simply read once and set consciously rather than accept unseen.
Mark your key events
Once events flow in, mark the ones that represent real outcomes (a purchase, a submitted lead form) as key events (Admin → Events). Key events are what GA4's conversion reporting is built around, and they're what a linked Google Ads account can import as conversions.
Link Google Ads, if you run it
Under Admin → Product links → Google Ads, link the accounts you advertise with. That unlocks importing key events as Ads conversions and sharing GA4 audiences with campaigns.
Where Measurebase fits
Nothing on the GA4 side changes when your tagging goes server-side: the property doesn't care whether hits arrive straight from the browser or via your server container on Measurebase; the difference is in how much reaches it, and how reliably. How events actually travel that route is covered in GA4 server-side: the basics, and the next step of this series is the web GTM container.