Skip to content
How GA4 can help you get better marketing results
You're spending money every month on Facebook ads, Google ads, and maybe an SEO retainer. Possibly a social media manager too.
And at the end of the month, you look at the results and try to piece together the story from a collection of reports that don't agree with each other, don't speak the same language, and were each written by someone who has a stake in looking good.
Your Facebook agency sends you a report showing that your ROAS is great. Your Google team says their campaigns are performing. Your SEO person shows you that traffic went up. Yet for all the good news, it doesn’t feel like it’s reflected in your revenue.
So how do you start to unpick and get a trustworthy view of your marketing activity and its success?
Owning your marketing data using GA4 is a great place to start. It will give you your own independent view of what's happening, one that doesn't belong to any of your vendors, can't be cherry-picked by an agency, and answers the question from your perspective, not theirs.
This article explains what GA4 is, why it matters specifically when you're spending money on marketing, and what you can do with it.
What GA4 is (in plain english)
Google Analytics 4 is a free tool from Google that sits on your website and records what happens there. When someone lands on your site, browses, adds something to their cart, or completes a purchase GA4 will record it.
More importantly: it sees it regardless of how they got there. Whether they clicked a Facebook ad, a Google ad, an organic search result, an email link, or typed your URL directly, GA4 records the visit and, if set up correctly, what happened next.
That's the key distinction. Every ad platform (Facebook, Google, TikTok) can only see what happens within its own ecosystem. GA4 sits on your website and sees everything that arrives there, from everywhere, providing you with independent data with a 360-degree view of the impact of your marketing on your website traffic and conversions that occur here.
Why this matters when you're spending $$ on marketing
When you're spending nothing on marketing, relying solely on word of mouth or existing traffic, you may not be as concerned about where visitors came from. Sales are sales.
The moment you start spending money to drive traffic and sales, everything changes. Now you need to know:
- Which channels are actually sending people to your website?
- Of the people who arrive from each channel, who's buying, and who's bouncing?
- Is the money you're spending on ads bringing in new customers and generating sales to make the money spent worthwhile?
- When revenue goes up or down, which channel moved, and was it something you did, or paid for?
GA4 is the independent view. It's not trying to sell you more ads. It's not trying to justify its own existence. It just records what happened on your website.
GA4 shines a light on the answer to many questions
Which channel is actually sending buyers, not just visitors?
Traffic is easy to generate. You can spend $50 on a boosted post and get 500 clicks. But if none of those 500 people bought anything, that $50 did nothing.
GA4 shows you sessions and conversions by channel side by side. Not just 'Facebook sent 500 people.' But 'Facebook sent 500 people, 3 of them bought something, and the average order value was $89.' That's a very different conversation than your agency's ROAS report.
Are new people are finding you or the same ones keep coming back?
GA4 distinguishes between new users and returning users. If your SEO person is claiming traffic growth, you can check.
Where do people drop off before buying?
GA4 can show you the path people take through your website and where they leave. If 400 people add to cart but only 30 complete checkout, that's a checkout problem, not a traffic problem. Knowing this means you spend your energy (and money) in the right place.
What happens after a campaign launches or changes?
When you start a new campaign, increase your budget, or try a new creative, GA4 shows you whether the traffic picture has changed and whether conversion rates have moved. This is basic business cause-and-effect, which is super useful when you’re assessing changes or new marketing activity.
Is your organic content is doing anything?
If you're paying someone to post on Instagram or write blog content, GA4 can tell you whether organic social or organic search is sending any traffic to your website and whether that traffic converts. Many business owners are surprised to find that their most expensive content channel is sending them almost no website visitors at all.
How do your different channels contribute to sales or leads?
GA4 will help you understand how all your marketing works together. Often, it’s not just one single channel but multiple channels that drive a sale, such as a visitor driven by a FB ad, followed by subsequent visits from organic search or email. Understanding the role of all your marketing provides you with context and transparency on what’s working with your marketing.
These are just some of the things you can start to see using your GA4 data.
Greater control and transparency
GA4 can give you transparency and insights to make better decisions on your marketing spend. Once set up correctly and is tracking conversions properly, you can:
- independently verify whether any channel is actually driving sales
- assess the impact of turning off a channel
- continue to own and control your data to ensure you have a historical view for comparison if you decide to move agency or marketers
- make marketing spend decisions based on your own data, instead of relying on vendor data
- start combining data from various platforms to build custom automated reports that will help you get the relevant information without effort, so you’re focused on assessing and taking action (not finding the data in the first instance).
The most common thing I hear:
"My agency sends me a report every month that doesn’t really explain what they did and the sales they made. It looks great but somehow it doesn’t feel like sales went up. I don't know which part of the report to question."
This is exactly the problem GA4 solves. Not by making the agency's report wrong but by giving you your own data to bring to that conversation.
But I already have Google Analytics. Isn't that enough?
Excellent! Here comes the ‘but’. It depends on what's actually set up.
Having GA4 installed and having GA4 tracking your marketing properly are two different things. The default installation tells you how many people visited your website. That's it.
To get the information that matters for marketing decisions, you need:
- Conversion tracking: GA4 needs to know what counts as a success on your site eg. a purchase, a form submission, a booking, a phone click. Without this, it can tell you people visited, but not whether they did anything valuable.
- UTM parameters on your ad links: Every paid link needs tags that tell GA4 which campaign, channel, and ad sent the visitor. Without UTMs, everything gets lumped into 'direct' traffic and you lose the channel breakdown.
- GA4 connected to your ad platforms: Linking GA4 to Google Ads and Google Search console (and configuring the connection correctly) lets you see ad performance and on-site behaviour together.
- Events that reflect your actual sales funnel: For eCommerce, GA4 should be recording add-to-cart, begin-checkout, and purchase events. For service, you want GA4 to capture leads.
- How all marketing contributes: Often it’s more than one thing that converts a browser to a buyer. GA4 gives you this complete view with different attribution models such as either the channel that drove the last click before a sale, or the first click, or even a combination of these.
If your GA4 is just the default install someone set up in 2022 and forgot about, it's likely tracking page views and not much else.
What 'owning your data' actually means
This phrase gets used a lot in marketing circles, but here's what it means in practice.
Your GA4 data belongs to you. It lives in your Google account. No agency can take it away when you switch providers. No platform can change their reporting methodology and have it retroactively affect your numbers. No vendor can choose what they show you and what they leave out. You can design reports to suit yourself rather than one-size-fits all templated for efficiency reports you receive from an agency reporting platform. You can query the data directly rather than relying on agency templated reports that are about efficiency for them, not clarity for you.
When you have properly set up GA4:
- You can go back and look at any period in history and see the same data, regardless of which agencies or platforms you were using at the time
- You can compare periods honestly eg. before and after a campaign, before and after a channel change and across years.
- You can bring an independent analyst (like me) in to look at your data without needing to get access to five different agency logins
- You can have an informed conversation with any vendor about their performance because you have your own numbers to reference.
- You keep your data when you change your marketing agency or vendors (I can’t tell you how many times people lose their data because of this).
That last point is worth sitting with. With both your agency's numbers and your GA4 numbers, you're in a much stronger position to ask the right questions.
How to know if your GA4 Is actually working
Here's a quick self-check. You should be able to do this in about five minutes:
- Log into analytics.google.com and confirm you have a GA4 property for your website (not an old Universal Analytics property which was sunset in 2023).
- Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. Can you see sessions broken down by channel and the conversion points for your business ie. Leads (phone clicks, email clicks, bookings, contact form submissions, quote requests) or Sales.
- On the same report, change the Dimension filter from Session primary channel group to Session source/ medium to see if you can identify traffic from specific ad campaigns or email or other marketing activities eg. Affiliates or referrals.
- Look at last month's data. Do the numbers look plausible relative to your actual orders or leads? If sessions are 10,000 but you know you had 50 visitors, something is wrong. If conversions are 0 but you made sales, tracking is broken.
If any of those steps reveals a gap, that's your starting point.
The bottom line
GA4 isn't complicated to understand as a concept. It's a tool that sits on your website, watches what happens, and tells you what it saw independent of your vendors, your agencies, and your ad platforms.
When you're spending money on marketing, even $1,000 a month, you deserve to have your own view of what that money is doing. Not a view filtered through someone else's reporting system.
That's what GA4 gives you. An independent, honest starting point for making marketing decisions and for having much better conversations with the people you're paying.
You built your business. You deserve to understand your own data.
About the author
Kirri is a GA4 and Google Tag Manager specialist at The Online Fix, a Melbourne-based analytics consultancy serving Australian businesses. She helps business owners stop guessing what's working in their marketing by building proper tracking foundations, clear Looker Studio dashboards, and honest reporting that reflects what's actually happening in the business.
