Setting up Measurebase: the complete guide

Everything from creating your account to reading your first real report — account, domain, script, power-ups, verification, your data, and alerting, in the order you'll actually do them.

01 · Creating your account

Account creation is deliberately light — you're not asked to pick a plan or configure anything up front. Everything below it is optional and can happen later.

Sign up

Two paths, both on the signup page: Continue with Google (a redirect to Google and back — since Google has already verified your email, you land signed in with nothing further to confirm), or an email account: first name, last name, work email, password (8 characters minimum), plus agreeing to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Verify your email (email signups only)

A verification link is sent immediately. Click it, or come back to the tab you signed up in and use "I've verified — continue" (with a Resend link option if it hasn't arrived). You can't reach the dashboard until this is done — Google sign-ups skip this step entirely.

Turn on two-factor authentication (optional, any time)

From Profile → Two-factor authentication: scan the QR code or enter the manual key in your authenticator app, confirm a 6-digit code, then save the one-time recovery codes somewhere safe. This only applies to email/password sign-in — a Google sign-in already carries Google's own 2FA.

Create your first account (workspace)

Once verified, you land on the Accounts screen. Click "Add account" and give it a name. Every new account starts on the Free plan automatically — there's nothing to choose at this point.

Choose a plan, whenever you're ready

All EU-hosted in Amsterdam, prices exclude VAT. Change plans any time from Billing → Change plan: upgrades apply immediately (prorated), while a downgrade or a monthly/yearly switch takes effect at the end of your current cycle.

Invite your team

From Settings → "+ Invite member", enter just an email address — no role picker. If they already have a Measurebase account they get access right away; otherwise they receive an invite email. There are only two roles: Owner (you, can't be removed) and Member. A pending invite shows a Pending badge with Resend and Cancel actions; active members get a Remove action.

02 · Setting up your first domain

Add the domain

From Domains → "+ New domain", fill in:

• Name — a friendly label, e.g. "Main website."
• Tagging subdomain type — Use my own domain (default, and the one you should pick — it's what unlocks the actual first-party benefits) or Use a Measurebase subdomain, which skips DNS entirely and goes active immediately, at the cost of the first-party advantages (cookie lifetime, ad-blocker resistance). Treat the generated option as a quick test, not a production setup.
• Domain — your root domain, e.g. yoursite.com.
• Tagging subdomain — a prefix, defaulting to mbase (giving mbase.yoursite.com) — change it if you'd rather use something else.
• Server container config — paste the string from GTM: Admin → Container Settings → Manually provision tagging server.
• Region — fixed to Amsterdam, Netherlands (EU).

Domain caps follow your plan: 1 on Free and Solo, 3 on Growth, 5 on Scale, 10 on Business, custom on Enterprise.

Point your DNS

Open the new domain's Settings page. It shows a single A record to add — an A record keeps your tagging subdomain genuinely first-party, so Safari treats its cookies like any other first-party cookie instead of capping them the way it does for CNAME-cloaked subdomains.

Copy the Host and Value shown, add the record at your DNS provider, then click Verify DNS. SSL is issued automatically once DNS propagates — usually within minutes. The domain's status flips from Pending to Active the moment this succeeds.

Running more than one setup

Need a second GTM property, or a separate setup for a subsidiary brand, on the same root domain? Add the domain again with a different subdomain — each one gets its own fully independent tagging server, up to your plan's domain cap.

03 · Installing the tracking script — and removing your old one

Generate your script

Open the domain and click Generate script. Enter your GTM web container ID (GTM-XXXXXXX) and choose a version:

• Enhanced (default, recommended) — a masked loader path with a ?mb= parameter, much harder for ad blockers and browser privacy filters to fingerprint.
• Standard — the familiar gtm.js?id= pattern. Pick this only if you specifically need GTM's own preview/debug mode to behave exactly like a stock, unmodified install.

Install it

Two snippets are generated. Paste the head snippet as high as possible inside <head>, and the body snippet immediately after the opening <body> tag — exactly where Google's own GTM instructions tell you to put it.

Handing it to a developer

If someone else is doing the install, use Send instruction email right there in the Generate script panel — enter their address and they get both snippets plus setup and testing steps, no copy-pasting on your end.

Set up your server container

In GTM, open your server container and add a Google Tag Manager: Web Container client, with your web container ID listed under Allowed Container IDs. Skip this and your script loads fine in the browser, but every event is silently rejected server-side — the most common reason a fresh install shows zero data.

04 · Configuring power-ups — and deciding which to use

All seven live on a domain's Advanced tracking tab. All are optional, all reversible, and none are required to get basic tracking working.

Deciding which ones you need

• Turn on by default: Cookie Keeper — near-zero downside, and it meaningfully helps Safari/iOS attribution survive.
• Turn on if it applies to you: Data Enrichment, if you'll actually reference the headers in a tag; IP Anonymization, if your privacy policy or legal team wants IPs masked; IP Filter, if you want internal/office/QA traffic excluded from your numbers entirely. Masking and excluding solve different problems — both can run together.
• Turn on once you're ready for it: Click ID Restorer, if you run paid ads and care about attribution surviving Safari/Brave (the Google/Microsoft side also needs a matching Final URL suffix configured in that ad platform itself, not just the toggle here); Enhanced Ad Blocker Protection, once you're already comfortable on the Enhanced loader — remember the reinstall step above whenever you change it.

05 · Verifying everything works

Don't consider setup finished until all five of these check out:

• Domain status is Active, not Pending. Stuck on Pending usually means DNS hasn't propagated yet — see Troubleshooting.
• Trigger a real hit — open your site in a normal (or incognito) tab and click around, or fire a test event from GTM's own preview mode.
• Check the request logs — a fresh row should appear within moments, with an Active status. Don't see it yet? Click Refresh on the logs page — it triggers on-demand ingestion instead of waiting for the next scheduled pull, so your test hit shows up right away.
• Confirm in GTM itself — your server container's preview/debug mode should show the request arriving and your tags firing.

06 · Understanding your data

Measurebase shows the same underlying traffic through several different lenses. Here's what each one is actually telling you.

Domain statistics — the deep dive for one domain

Everything below lives on a single domain's own statistics page, behind one shared date-range picker:

• Requests — a total for the selected range plus the trend vs. the previous period.
• Request types — a breakdown across the nine categories your logs use (see below).
• Requests by origin — which hostname sent the traffic; GTM-Preview hits and requests with no referrer are deliberately folded into one "Preview / Direct" row so they don't read as missing data.
• Browser & device — a donut you can toggle between Browser / OS / Device. Worth watching for one specific reason: the larger your Safari/Firefox share, the more work Cookie Keeper is doing for you behind the scenes.
• Consent Mode v2 — four donuts (ad storage, analytics storage, ad user data, ad personalization), each split Granted / Denied / Unknown. This reflects the real signal your own CMP is already producing — Measurebase doesn't set or override consent on your behalf, only reports what it sees.
• Bot traffic — a stacked bar, one segment per bot name (search engines, social/preview bots, AI/LLM crawlers, SEO tools, security scanners, headless browsers), with anything else bot-shaped folding into a generic "Other bot" segment.

Domain analytics — comparing across every domain

A separate, simpler page: one small volume chart per domain on the account, side by side, so you can spot which one needs attention at a glance. Click View on any card to jump into that domain's full statistics page for the deep dive above.

Request logs — the raw feed

Each row shows Time, Event/tag, Status, Response time, Region, and Client IP. The nine request types you'll see: Enhanced tracking script, Ad-block protected request, Google Ads (ad-block protected), GTM tracking script, Google tag, GA4, GTM preview mode, Service worker, and Other (bot/scanner noise — never billed, never counted as real traffic).

Filter by 2xx / 4xx / 5xx, or export to CSV — the exportable date range is capped by your plan's log retention (3 / 7 / 14 / 21 / 30 days on Free / Solo / Growth / Scale / Business, custom on Enterprise).

Your account overview

Two request numbers sit side by side here on purpose, and they're not meant to match: a date-range Requests card (whatever range you pick, with a delta vs. the previous period) and a Requests (cycle) card — your usage so far this billing cycle against your plan's quota, which is the number that actually determines whether you get auto-upgraded or paused.

Billing usage

Billing shows that same cycle number again, this time bundled with your plan, price, billing dates, and invoices — the same fact, examined from a "what am I paying for" angle rather than a second, different number.

One thing that isn't a chart: foreign traffic

Unlike bot traffic, this never shows up as a number to read anywhere — it's a monitoring check that opens an Alert the moment another Measurebase customer's domain shows up as a Referer on your account. Almost always a copy-pasted snippet somewhere, and worth investigating the moment it fires rather than tracking visually over time.

07 · Managing notifications & alerts

Five checks run automatically, continuously, across every domain and account:

Set your no-data threshold

Per domain, on its Settings page under Monitoring: "Alert me if no data for" — anywhere from 1 to 168 hours (a full week), 24 hours by default. Raise it for a quiet B2B site where a slow weekend is normal; lower it if you want to know within the hour on a high-traffic property. New domains get a grace period before this check switches on.

Where you'll see an alert

• The bell icon on every dashboard page — its badge counts unacknowledged open alerts; opening the dropdown clears the badge without resolving the underlying issue.
• The dedicated Alerts page — Domain, Type, Message, Status, and when it opened, paginated.
• An alerts panel right on the account Overview page.
• A banner on the affected domain's own statistics page.
• Email — a "New {severity} alert" message when one opens, "Resolved" when it clears.
• Slack (see below).

Connecting Slack

Up to 3 channels or workspaces per account, connected from Settings → "Add to Slack" — an OAuth flow, no manual webhook pasting needed. Every connected channel receives every alert; there's no per-channel filtering by type or domain. A domain-specific alert names that domain in the message; an account-wide one like quota names the account instead.

Alerts resolve themselves

Once the underlying condition clears — DNS correct again, traffic resumed, usage back under the threshold — the alert closes on its own. There's no manual "resolve" button, only "acknowledge," which just quiets the bell.

08 · Infrastructure checklist: CDN, caching & CSP

Most setups need nothing beyond sections 2 and 3. A few infrastructure layers can interfere if you're already running them, though — worth a five-minute check the first time, especially if your own site sits behind a CDN or a strict CSP.

A CDN in front of your own site

If you proxy your whole domain through Cloudflare, Fastly, or similar, make sure your tagging subdomain's record isn't being intercepted, cached, or rewritten unless you've deliberately configured that. The safest default is to exclude the tagging subdomain from proxying entirely (a plain "DNS only" record) so traffic reaches Measurebase directly; if you do need it proxied, disable caching rules for that hostname specifically.

Caching

The loader script itself can be cached briefly without harm, but the actual collection requests — every real tracking hit — must always reach Measurebase live. Make sure no blanket "cache every request under this path" rule from your CDN or reverse proxy also catches your tagging traffic.

Content-Security-Policy

If your site sends a CSP header, its script-src and connect-src (and img-src, if a browser ever falls back to a pixel) need to allow your tagging subdomain. Because it's first-party — the same root domain as your site — a wildcard like *.yoursite.com already covers it in most policies, but a CSP scoped to an exact hostname will silently block the loader until you add the new one explicitly.

09 · Troubleshooting common problems

Quick-start checklist

The whole guide above, condensed to one pass.

• Sign up and verify your email
• Add your first domain
• Point an A record at Measurebase, verify DNS
• Generate an Enhanced script
• Install it, remove the old GTM snippet
• Add the Web Container client server-side
• Turn on Cookie Keeper
• Decide on the other power-ups
• Confirm a real hit in the logs + GTM preview
• Set your no-data threshold
• Connect Slack or check your email alerts