GA4 Is Not Set Up Just Because It Is Installed

Somebody installed Google Analytics on your website. Maybe it was your web designer, maybe it was a plugin, maybe it came with your theme. The reports load, the graphs move, and everybody assumes the job is done. Most of the time, it is not. A default installation of GA4 collects page views and not much else, and the settings that make it useful for a real business were never touched.

I open GA4 accounts every week that have been "running" for two years with the same gaps. Here is the checklist I walk through, in the order I check them.

No key events are marked

GA4 tracks events, things like form submissions, button clicks, and completed bookings. But until you mark the important ones as key events, GA4 treats them all the same, and Google Ads cannot import them as conversions. This is the single most common gap I find. The data was being collected the whole time, sitting one checkbox away from being useful. It is also why so many owners tell me their tracking does not work, when the truth is closer to what I describe in your conversion tracking is probably broken. The tag fires. The finish line was just never set.

The timezone and currency are wrong

Plenty of GA4 properties are still set to whatever timezone the account defaulted to, and I have seen Kentucky businesses reporting on Pacific time with the wrong currency on top of it. That sounds harmless until you try to compare a Tuesday in GA4 against a Tuesday in your booking system and nothing lines up. Your reports are quietly shifted, and every day-by-day comparison you make is off.

Google Ads is not linked

If GA4 and Google Ads are not linked, each one tells you a partial story and neither can help the other. Ads cannot see your GA4 key events, GA4 cannot show you clean campaign detail, and you end up doing the tired comparison dance I wrote about in why Google Ads and GA4 never agree on your numbers. Linking the accounts takes a few minutes when you have the right access, and it should have been done on day one.

Data retention is still set to 2 months

This one bites people later. GA4 defaults to keeping detailed user and event data for only 2 months. After that, the granular stuff is gone and you cannot get it back. If you ever want to compare this spring against last spring, or build a proper audience from last year's shoppers, that history has to exist. Changing the retention setting to 14 months takes ten seconds, but it only protects you going forward. Every month on the short setting is a month you will never see again.

The quiet gaps nobody checks

• Your own traffic is counted. You, your staff, and your web person all visit your site. Without internal traffic filtered or at least flagged, those visits mix into your numbers, and on a small business site your team can be a real slice of the total, making engagement look better than your customers actually deliver.
• Site search is not tracked. If your site has a search box, what people type into it is a list of things they wanted and may not have found. Untracked, that list is invisible.
• Forms are not tracked properly. A form view is not a lead. If GA4 only sees the page the form sits on, you have no idea how many people started it, finished it, or gave up halfway.
• Payment processors pollute your sources. When a customer pays through an outside processor and comes back to your thank-you page, GA4 often credits the processor as the source of the sale. Your reports start showing a payment company as one of your top marketing channels, and the ads or search visits that actually earned the sale get nothing.

None of these are exotic problems. They are the standard settings and follow-through steps that get skipped when analytics is treated as an install instead of a setup. The good news is that most of them take minutes to fix once you know where to look.

This is the exact checklist I work through on my conversion tracking help calls. We open your GA4 together on a screen share, I show you each gap in your own account, and we fix it while you watch, so your reports finally describe your business instead of a default template. Fix sessions are $99 for the first hour, and the free 15-minute Marketing Check is an easy way to find out how many of these gaps your account has.