Overview

Google Analytics 4 is the latest (at this time, October 2023) tool from Google to track website use.

Options

There are two ways to set up Google Analytics. You can start with one system and change to the other if your needs change.

Standalone:
Use this option if you only care about numbers of people accessing your site, which pages are getting read, and general numbers.

With Google Tag Manager:
Use this option if you want to know details about button clicks, navigation methods, and how users are interacting with your site.

Starting with Google Analytics

The normal sequence for starting (either standalone or with Google Tag Manager) is:

Create a Google Analytics account

Create a Google Analytics property for your website
(an account may have multiple properties)

Add a data stream to your Google Analytics property
(a property usually only has one multiple data stream)

Go to https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/ to create an account. You should log in using your Illinois.edu account. You may wish to create a service account so that multiple people can administer the account, or you can give multiple Illinois.edu people administration access.

If your illinois.edu account does not work, you will need to create a Google Apps @ Illinois account. Follow the instructions in this KB article to do so.

Follow instructions at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9304153 to create a property and data stream.

Standalone Instructions

Add the Google Analytics tag using your CMS tools or manually add the tag to your HTML code.

With Google Tag Manager

Follow instructions in the Google Tag Manager section to connect your Google Analytics account to Google Tag Manager.

Some Best Practices

This is not required, but you may want to update these settings:

Ensure Industry category, reporting time zone, and currency are set correctly
(under Admin – Property Settings – Property details)

Set Include Google signals in reporting identity to yes
(under Admin – Property Settings – Data Collection and Modification – Data Collection)

Set Data Retention to 14 Months
(under Admin – Property Settings – Data Collection and Modification – Data Retention)

Set Enhanced Measurement to yes
(under Admin – Property Settings – Data Collection and Modification – Data Streams – Web Data Stream)

Set List Unwanted Referrers to your domain
(under Admin – Property Settings – Data Collection and Modification – Data Streams – Web Data Stream – Configuration – Show All)

Add IP addresses as internal
(IT only, see https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10104470 for more information)