GA4 for SEO: Everything You Need to Know

As search engines and the digital landscape evolve, it becomes more difficult to track how people interact with websites due to updated legislation and increased technological complexity. While this makes interpreting SEO performance more challenging, it is more important than ever before to ensure that SEO campaigns are operating on accurate, data-driven decisions.

Once Universal Analytics was replaced by GA4 in 2023, marketing professionals were presented with several new ways to track and interpret data collected from their websites. 

In this guide, we will take you through everything you need to know about SEO performance tracking using GA4. 

We will cover:

• The type of data that GA4 collects
• The key steps involved in setting up a GA4 property
• Events that you can track using GA4
• How to evaluate the quality of conversions you receive
• How consent, privacy, and data gaps can impact your data
• How to validate the data you receive in your GA4 property
• Our step-by-step process for collecting accurate data

Keep reading to learn more about how to collect and validate data in GA4, and how SEO performance tracking can be used for your website.

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Jump to:

• What Is GA4?
• GA4 Setup Essentials for SEO
• GA4 Event Tracking for SEO
• Lead and Conversion Quality Tracking
• Consent, Privacy, and Data Gaps in GA4
• Validating and Maintaining GA4 Data
• Wildcat Digital GA4 Playbook
• Summary

What Is GA4?

Google Analytics (GA) is a platform developed by Google to track user interactions with websites and applications. GA4 is the latest iteration of the platform, after Universal Analytics (UA) was retired in 2023. By connecting a website with a GA4 property, you can effectively track various engagement metrics to help you better understand how users are interacting with your website. When GA4 was first introduced, it was presented as an event-based analytics tool that focused on specific user interactions instead of more general metrics such as sessions and pageviews. 

In GA4, events are organised into the following categories:

• Automatically collected events – These events are enabled by default, including session start, first visit, and user engagement.
• Enhanced Measurement events – Although enabled initially, these events can be on or off. Enhanced measurement events include page view, click, file download, and scroll.
• Recommended events – Add events using Google Tag Manager (GTM) such as login, purchase, search, and generate lead.
• Custom events – You can also manually implement your own custom events to track interactions of interest, including email address clicks, phone number clicks, and other Call to Action (CTA) clicks.

Why It Matters for SEO

For SEO professionals, the migration to GA4 from UA meant a drastic shift in the way success was measured. Specific events that aren’t automatically set up in GA4 require manual implementation to ensure relevant data is collected. This gives more flexibility and detail to define success in the way you want. By tracking relevant user interactions, a comprehensive view of the customer journey can be developed, with integrated advanced machine learning models. This makes GA4 a vital tool for SEO performance tracking and developing data-backed strategies.

GA4 Setup Essentials for SEO

To create a GA4 property and start collecting data, it is entirely free. Here’s a quick guide to setting up a new property:

• Navigate to Google Analytics
• Select the account you wish to use
• Select Create Property in the Property column
• Enter relevant details for your business, then click Create.

Once you have a new property set up, you will need to add your GA4 tag to your website. To find your GA4 tag, once in your GA4 property, simply navigate to Admin > Data Streams > Web. Here, you will see the website that your property is linked to. Clicking on your domain will present your web stream details, including a unique ‘Measurement ID’. This is your GA4 tag.

There are several ways to implement your Google tag on your website, but the 

most popular methods involve using GTM, adding the tag manually, or using a dedicated plugin.

Google Tag Manager

To begin collecting data in your GA4 property using Google Tag Manager, you must first ensure that Google Tag Manager is connected with your website. This will require you to add two snippets of code to your website. These snippets are provided by Google in your GTM account. Once you have added the GTM snippets to your website and validated the connection, you can then add your Google tag in GTM. You will need to click New Tag, then select Google Tag. Here, you will be prompted to add the measurement ID. Remember to click ‘Publish’ once you’ve added the tag.

Manual Installation

Navigating to GA4, there is an option to copy a snippet of code and manually add this snippet to your website’s HTML. This snippet must go into the <head> section of every page on your website; otherwise, some pages will not send data.

Website Plugin

There are a number of plugins available to install for free that will connect your website with your GA4 property. For example, for WordPress sites, the plugin Site Kit simply requires connection to your Google account that contains the GA4 property, and input of the measurement ID to start collecting data. Once you’ve installed the plugin and connected it to your GA4 property, your Google tag will be automatically added to your website.

GA4 Event Tracking for SEO

Whereas previous iterations of Google’s tracking platforms focused on traffic and sessions, GA4 for SEO focuses on events to understand user behaviour. Events such as page views give an indication of how popular content is on your website, but more specific events can tell you the myriad ways users are engaging with your content.

Essential events to track in GA4 for measuring SEO performance include:

• Form submissions – Track how many times users submit the contact form on your website to track data regarding organic leads. Recording the landing page that users subsequently submit a form from will tell you which pages are high-performers.
• Phone call clicks – When a user clicks on your business phone number, this can result in a lead being generated. Tracking phone call clicks will help you to understand how many users are reaching out with phone call enquiries.
• Email clicks – As with phone call clicks, email clicks will often generate a lead via your email. GA4 can record these clicks so that you can pair clicks of your email address on your website with qualified leads that enter your inbox.
• CTA clicks – If you have designated CTAs on your website that indicate a potential lead, users clicking on these CTAs can be tracked as events. For example, you may wish to track the number of users that click on a button with ‘Discuss Your Requirements’ or ‘Receive a Quote’ to collect data on the number of users engaging in this way.

In GA4, events such as those described above can be marked as a ‘Conversion’ (now known as ‘Key Events’). To mark a GA4 event as a key event, simply navigate to your property, select Admin > Events, and click the star next to your chosen event to mark it as a key event. This will ensure that events deemed as high value will be collected and recorded as key events.

To learn more about events and how to track them, read our detailed blog: Event Tracking in GA4 for SEO

Lead and Conversion Quality Tracking

As you record more events and mark them as conversions, it is important to assign value to these events. For example, a user that submits a lead using a contact form is far more likely to generate business than a user that only clicks a CTA. While both are important events to track for understanding user behaviour, an organic lead shows a tangible business opportunity, whereas a CTA click indicates how engaging your content is.

Assessing Lead Quality

When you receive a lead from your website, the next step for SEO professionals is to assess the quality of the lead. Using GA4, it is easier than ever to identify the channel that the lead came from so that you can recognise whether it was received as a result of organic search. 

Lead Acquisition Report

In your GA4 property, you will have access to a report that will show how users got to your site before becoming leads. As this report is user-scoped, you will receive data on the full user journey, including new leads, qualified leads, and converted leads.

Lead Disqualification Report

Using the Business Objectives report, you can access data in GA4 regarding why leads are disqualified by defining custom reasons such as timing and budget. This will help you to visualise leads dropping off.

Monetary Value

Using GA4, you can also assign a monetary value to the leads you receive and the conversions you record, so that you can paint a picture of the revenue your website generates via these events.

CRM Feedback

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data can be used in conjunction with your GA4 data to create a more comprehensive user journey. Import data from your CRM to GA4 to visualise lead quality and identify trends.

To learn more about how to assess the quality of leads you track in GA4, read our recent blog: How to Track Lead Quality from SEO

Consent, Privacy, and Data Gaps in GA4

When a user declines tracking, this can cause a loss of data. Privacy regulations such as GDPR dictate that users have a legal right to decline optional tracking such as cookies, which can result in up to 30% of tracking data being lost or blocked. The main data gaps in GA4’s tracking caused by data consent or privacy include:

• Cookie declines – If a user declines cookies when they are on your website, this will block GA4 from tracking session identifiers, reducing the data you can record on them.
• Data minimisation – To maintain legal compliance, GA4 will automatically remove certain details about your website’s users such as IP addresses and device details.
• Data thresholding – If the number of users recorded from specific demographics is too low, GA4 will apply data thresholding to prevent the identification of individual users.
• Data retention – In GA4, you can select the time period of raw user-level data retention as either 2 or 14 months. This limits how far back you can analyse granular, user-level data.

Google Consent Mode

To bridge the gap between data loss and user metrics, GA4 has a ‘consent mode’ that will predict the value of data loss and present an amended figure. Consent mode will receive the consent choices of users from a cookie banner, and dynamically adapt the behaviour of Ads, Analytics, and third-party tags that create or read cookies. However, incomplete datasets are now the industry standard, following consent and data privacy laws.

To read more on how data in GA4 is affected by consent and privacy, take a look at our in-depth article: Consent, Privacy, and GA4: What SEOs Need to Know

Validating and Maintaining GA4 Data

To ensure GA4 data is still being recorded correctly, it is important to regularly validate the results you are seeing in GA4 with actual business data. For example, if you recorded 50 leads in May using GA4, cross-reference this figure with your own data to ensure you received those 50 leads. Tools within GA4 that you can use to further validate data collection in your property are detailed below.

Debug View

By navigating to Admin > DebugView in your GA4 property, you can monitor the events that occur from the designated device/browser you have enabled for debugging. By first enabling debug mode either in Google Tag Manager’s preview mode or using the Google Analytics Debugger Chrome extension, you can view the incoming data for your property. Once in debug mode, interacting with your website will show you the hits that are sent to your property so that you can verify data is received by GA4 and displayed in reports as you expect.

Real-Time Reports

Navigate to Reports > Realtime in your GA4 property. Here, you will find a collection of data that reports on website usage over the past 30 minutes, including a map of active users, conversions fired, traffic sources, and a timeline of events. To ensure data is being recorded accurately, you can perform a specific action on your website and monitor the events recorded in real time to ensure your event appears.

Signs Tracking is not Functioning Correctly

Tracking issues are unfortunately common, and typically stem from cookie consent blocking, measurement IDs, and missing base tags. The key signs that your tracking is not functioning correctly include increases in unassigned traffic, irregularly high conversions, or the ‘session_start’ event failing to fire before other events. Other key aspects to check include:

• If no data has been recorded on your property for the past 48 hours, this is a sign that the tracking on your website is broken.
• If “Direct” is the primary source for your lead-generation website, UTM tracking parameters are likely missing or broken.
• Moving between your website and a third-party checkout page creates a new session and registers as “Referral” traffic instead of continuous attribution.

Wildcat Digital GA4 Playbook

At Wildcat Digital, when we first start an SEO campaign, one of the most important foundational steps our dedicated account managers perform is to ensure accurate tracking is in place. 

Establishing accurate SEO performance tracking involves:

1. Either gaining access to an existing GA4 property or setting a new one up.
2. If we are setting up a new property, we will connect this with a GTM container and validate that tracking is successfully implemented on the website.
3. Once we have access to a functioning GA4 property, our next step is to ensure that the property is collecting data as it should be.
4. We will review the events in the property and set up new ones where necessary, marking relevant events as conversions.
5. We also take steps to ensure that a suitable cookie policy is in place on our clients’ websites. Where none exists, we set up cookie banners to maintain legal compliance.
6. As we collect data, we continuously validate to ensure the results we are seeing match with business data. 

In Summary:

• GA4 for SEO provides various metrics to evaluate website performance and deliver data-driven strategies.
• Once relevant events are created and recorded accurately, they can be assessed for quality to determine commercial results.
• Maintaining actionable, accurate data requires frequent validation using CRM feedback and business insights.

Speak to the Data-Driven SEO Team at Wildcat Digital

SEO performance is only as good as the data behind it. 

At Wildcat Digital, we take accurate data and reporting seriously. This means our SEO campaigns are data-driven to deliver optimal solutions based on comprehensive user journeys. 

To receive expert guidance on data measurement and kickstart your SEO performance, reach out to our team today for a free consultation.