GA4 & the ad platforms

Measurement is the least glamorous part of a marketing engagement and the one that decides whether any of the rest can be judged. It is configured and verified before the first campaign runs, not after the first disappointing month.

Whose accounts these are

Yours. Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, GA4 and Search Console are created in your name and we are granted access. When an engagement ends, the history stays with you, which is the entire point, and a surprisingly common thing for agencies to get wrong.

Most analytics problems are definition problems

An analytics setup rarely fails because the tag is missing. It fails because nobody agreed what counts as a lead, so three reports count three different things and the argument about which is right outlives the campaign they were supposed to settle.

So the work starts with a written definition of the handful of events that matter to this business, and only then with the implementation. Fewer events, defined once, beat forty events nobody trusts.

Analytics and ad platforms, in practice

• A short list of events, each with a written definition and an owner
• Consistent campaign tagging, so channel reporting means something
• Conversions checked against the business’s own records before anyone optimises to them

See digital marketing for how campaigns are measured, and SEO versus PPC for how the channels compare. Google’s GA4 events reference documents the model.

How this work usually starts

Measurement work starts with a definition document, not a tag. Half a dozen events, each with a plain-English definition and a named owner, agreed before implementation. It takes an afternoon and it prevents the argument that otherwise runs for the life of the account.

Two things make analytics trustworthy: a short list of events that each have a written definition, and a periodic check of the conversion count against the business’s own records. Without the second, the first is a set of numbers nobody has reason to believe.