Is GA4 really free, or are there hidden costs?

It is free. Google's own Google Analytics page says the tools are provided free of charge. The paid version is Analytics 360, built for large organisations with very large data volumes, and the standard version is more than enough for an SME website. The real cost you may face is your web team's time to set up events on your buttons, so agree on that clearly when you hire them.

What is a key event in GA4, and which ones should a small business set?

A key event is an event you tell GA4 matters to your business. You mark one by going to Admin, then Events, and clicking the star. A standard property can mark up to 30, but I suggest starting with two to four. For a business that sells through conversation, the essentials are a LINE button click, a phone tap and a successful form submission. Then test each on your phone in Realtime.

Why does GA4 show fewer website visits than the link clicks Facebook reports?

Because the two count different things. Facebook counts clicks, while GA4 only counts visits where the page actually loaded. Someone who taps and closes before the page finishes loading is counted by Facebook but never seen by GA4. And if your site has a cookie consent banner, people who decline are not counted in the usual way either. So the two numbers will never be equal. What matters is whether their trends move in the same direction.

How long does GA4 keep historical data?

For standard properties, user-level and event-level data can be kept for 2 months or 14 months. That setting affects the deep-dive Explorations and funnel reports, while the standard summary reports under Reports are not affected. I recommend going to Admin, then Data retention, and setting it to 14 months now, in case you ever want to dig back further.

Who should be the GA4 Administrator, the business owner or the web team?

The company's own Google account should be the Administrator, because Administrator is the role that can add or remove users and assign roles. Your web team can still be added with the role they need to do their work. If you ever change teams or lose contact with the old one, your business's historical data stays with you. A good web team will be glad to set it up this way.

Google Analytics 4 for Small Business Owners: Reports That Matter

Many shop owners I know have CCTV cameras covering every corner. The front of the shop, the back room, the counter. A technician came in, installed everything in a day, showed that every camera was on screen, and left. Everything has been recorded around the clock ever since.

Then one day the owner wants to know something. How many customers came in yesterday afternoon? Did the people who stopped to look at the window display actually come in and ask about prices? The owner opens the recorder and just sits there in front of the screen, not sure which camera to check or how far back to go. Some owners only find out at that moment that the password to the recorder is still with the technician who installed it.

Google Analytics 4, or GA4, on your website is that set of cameras. Your web team installed it, and data flows in every day. But when you open it yourself, the screen is full of charts, numbers and dozens of menus, and it is hard to know where to start.

Let me say this first: the fact that your website already has GA4 is a very good thing. The team that set it up did the right thing. This article will not try to teach you every menu in GA4, because a small business owner does not need to know that much. I want to help you pick the few reports that answer real business questions, show you how to make GA4 count customer contacts, walk through the number traps owners most often misread, and cover the most important point of all: who should hold the keys to this data.

A five-minute check: is your GA4 ready to use?

Before reading on, pick up your phone or open your computer and go to analytics.google.com with your own email address. Then try to answer three questions.

Start with the simplest one. Can you see your own website's property? If you get a blank page, or the system invites you to create a new account, your email has not been given access to your own website's GA4.

If you can get in, click Admin and look at Property access management to see which role your email has. Is it Administrator, or only Viewer? Finally, look for numbers on key events such as LINE button clicks, phone taps or form submissions.

If you can answer all three, you are further along than most website owners. If you get stuck on any of them, do not worry. Each one has a fix in this article.

What GA4 is, explained for a shop owner

GA4 is a free Google tool that records who comes to your website, where they came from, which pages they look at and what they do. Every action is recorded as what GA4 calls an event. Opening a page is one event. Clicking a link out to LINE is another.

What makes the GA4 screen look so busy is that it records everything with equal weight. Scrolling, opening a page, clicking a link: to the machine, they all matter the same. Our job is to tell GA4 which events actually mean something to the business, and then focus mostly on those numbers.

For a business that closes sales through conversation, whether a clinic, a contractor, a factory or a tour company, only two questions really matter. Where do customers come from, and which pages lead them to contact you?

Three reports that answer real business questions

GA4 has dozens of reports, but I really only use three, and I believe most business owners need no more than that.

Where customers come from: Traffic acquisition

Go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. This report splits your visitors by what GA4 calls a channel. Organic Search means people who found you on Google and clicked a non-ad link. Organic Social means people who clicked through from Facebook or another social site without an ad. Referral means people who came from a link on another website. Direct means people who typed your address or used a saved link. Those are the definitions from Google's help page on the default channel group.

What to look at is the trend. Compare this month with last month: which channels grew and which dropped away. Daily numbers go up and down all the time, so do not be alarmed by any single day.

Which pages lead to contact: Landing page

Under Engagement there is a Landing page report, which shows the page people first arrived on. Once you have set up your key events (explained in the next section), this report also gets a Key events column. That is where you find out which pages lead people to tap LINE or call you.

The answer often surprises owners. The page with the most visitors may be an article people read and leave, while the page that actually leads to contact is a small service page with only a few dozen visits a month. If you are going to put effort into improving your website, that second kind of page is where it pays off most.

Who is on the site right now: Realtime

The Realtime report shows what has happened on your website in the last few minutes. I do not use it to watch sales. I use it as a checking tool. Every time a new button is added or a new key event is set up, open the website on your phone, tap that button yourself, and see whether the event name shows up in Realtime. If it does not, the setup is not really working yet.

Set key events on the buttons closest to money

A key event is an event you tell GA4 is important to your business. According to Google's help page About key events, you set one by going to Admin, then Events, and clicking the star icon next to the event you want. The same page states that a standard property can mark up to 30 events as key events, while Analytics 360, the enterprise version, allows 50.

Thirty sounds like a lot, but I suggest starting with just two to four. For a business that sells through conversation, the ones to have are a click on a LINE button or link, a tap on your phone number from a mobile, and a successful contact form submission. If your website has bookings or a shopping cart, add a completed booking or purchase.

To be honest, GA4 does not collect some of these events on its own out of the box. Your web team has to set up each button to send an event first, and only then will you see its name on the Events page and be able to star it. If you open the Events page and see nothing related to LINE or phone calls, the one sentence to send your web team is: "Please set up events for the LINE button, the phone button and the form, and tell me the event names." Some teams do this through Google Tag Manager and some write it into the website code. Either way is fine, as long as it is tested until it really works on the live website.

The words "really works" matter a great deal. I will tell you what happened on our own website in the real-story section below.

Number traps owners often misread

The numbers in GA4 are not wrong, but they are counted by GA4's own rules. If you do not know the rules, it is easy to draw the wrong conclusion. Here are the four I see most often.

Direct and (not set) do not mean customers found you on their own

By Google's definition, the Direct channel is people who typed your address or used a saved link. In practice, though, anything GA4 cannot identify a source for often ends up there too. A website link forwarded in a LINE chat often reaches GA4 without any information about where it came from. If Direct looks unusually high, do not conclude that your brand is so well known that people type your address from memory.

As for (not set), Google's help page describes it as a placeholder GA4 uses when it has received no information for that dimension. There are several causes, from ad links with incomplete tagging to consent settings implemented the wrong way. If you see a lot of it, send a screenshot to your web team. For the links you share yourself, tag your links with UTM parameters so GA4 can tell which channel each visit came from.

Consent makes the numbers lower than reality

If your website has a cookie consent banner, which Thai business websites should have under the PDPA, visitors who decline are not counted in the usual way. Google's help page on behavioral modeling for consent mode states plainly that Analytics will be missing data for users who decline consent, and that Google has a system to model the behavior of those users instead.

But there is a detail people rarely mention. The same page says a property only qualifies for this modeling if it has at least 1,000 events per day from users who declined, for at least 7 days, and at least 1,000 daily users who consented, on at least 7 of the previous 28 days. Most SME websites do not reach that threshold, which means the numbers you see only cover the people who accepted.

That is no reason to remove your consent banner. Asking for consent is the right thing to do, and I have covered the details in the PDPA checklist for business websites. What to do is simply remember that GA4 numbers are always lower than the true number of people, and use them for trends and proportions rather than as an exact headcount.

Users and Sessions are different numbers

Users counts people. Sessions counts visits. A customer who checks prices in the morning, comes back to look at your portfolio in the afternoon, and returns once more in the evening to contact you counts as 1 user but 3 sessions. And if the same person visits once from a phone and once from a work computer, GA4 may count 2 users, because it sees two different devices.

Whenever you compare numbers with last month's report, or with a report from your web team, check first that you are looking at the same column. I have seen a meeting go on for an hour before anyone realised one person was reading users and the other was reading sessions.

Older data in the deep-dive reports can disappear

According to Google's help page on data retention, for standard properties, user-level and event-level data can be kept for 2 months or 14 months, depending on the setting. That setting only affects Explorations and funnel reports. The standard summary reports under Reports are not affected.

In practice, if one day you want to dig back into which pages last year's customers passed through before contacting you, and the property is set to 2 months, that data is already gone. To check, go to Admin and then Data retention. If it says 2 months, ask whoever is Administrator to change it to 14 months. It takes less than a minute.

"Surely the numbers in Facebook and LINE OA are enough?"

I hear this question a lot, and it is a fair one. If most of your customers already message you through your Page and LINE OA, the numbers in those two apps tell you a great deal. I am not going to argue with that.

Each platform tells the story from its own point of view, though. Facebook can tell you which post got link clicks. LINE OA can tell you how many people added you as a friend. Neither can see the full picture: which pages someone who clicked from Facebook read on your website, how long they stayed, and whether they finally tapped a contact button. GA4 is the one tool that sits inside your own website and sees every channel coming in, all in one place.

The numbers from each place will never match exactly, either. Facebook counts clicks. GA4 counts visits where the page loaded and consent conditions were met. Someone who taps a link and closes it before the page loads is counted by Facebook but never seen by GA4. So treat the two sets of numbers as trends that should move in the same direction, rather than expecting them to be equal.

And there is one point no tool can see at all: the conversation after a customer taps through to LINE. GA4 only knows that someone tapped the button. It does not know whether that chat became a sale. No analytics setting closes that gap on its own, which is why we pair the tools with a simple log kept by people, described in the real-stories section below.

Who should hold the keys to the property

If I had to pick just one thing from this article for you to do, it would be this.

Google's help page on roles and permissions in Analytics explains that Administrator is the role with full control of Analytics, including adding and removing users and assigning roles to others. Editor can change settings but cannot manage users, and Viewer can only view the data.

In shop-owner terms, whoever is Administrator holds the key to the CCTV recording room. If that person is a freelancer or the agency that built your website, and one day you cannot reach them, years of your business's data are locked in a room you cannot open yourself.

The best setup is to make your company's Google account the Administrator, and add your web team with the role they need to do their job. There is no need to push the team out. A good web team will understand this and be glad to set it up for you. Before signing with any web team, it is worth asking in writing whose account the analytics property will live under.

Why starting early pays off

GA4 only counts from the day it is installed and configured. It cannot go back and collect last month's data. If you set a key event on your LINE button today, in three months you will have three months of data to compare which channels bring the most contacts. If you wait until next year, those three months are simply gone.

Data collected over a long period also reveals seasonality. An air-conditioning service will see when searches rise. A clinic will see which months bring more questions about which services. A picture like that needs at least a full year of data, and every month without the setup is a month you never get back.

The minimum version you can finish this week

If this feels like a lot, just do these three things first. Make the company email an Administrator, have at least one key event that you have tested and know works, and set data retention to 14 months. Everything else can be learned later, but if these three are delayed, you lose data without noticing.

As for reports, in the first week just open Traffic acquisition. Get used to seeing which channels bring the most people. The next questions will come naturally.

Open a real account first, without fear of breaking anything

If you are not yet comfortable clicking around your own GA4, Google offers a demo account that anyone with a Google account can open. It contains real business data from the Google Merchandise Store, Google's online merchandise shop, and from a mobile game called Flood-It! Everyone who enters gets the Viewer role, so you can click through every report without causing any damage.

I suggest opening Traffic acquisition and Landing page for the Google Merchandise Store first. Once you have seen what a real, busy shop looks like, your own account becomes much easier to understand.

Another tool worth opening alongside it is Search Console, which shows what people searched for before they found your website, while GA4 shows what they did after arriving. Search Console numbers have shifted quite a bit recently because Google's AI now answers some questions directly. I explain how to read them in Your Rankings Haven't Changed, But Where Did the Clicks Go? And if you want the wider picture of how data helps a business grow, the basics are in our article on data analytics for business websites.

Real stories from our own website

I can tell you all this not because I read it somewhere, but because it happened on the TumWebSME website.

When we rebuilt the site, we found our old GA4 property was one nobody on the current team could access. It was our own website's data, yet we could not read it. In the end we created our own property under the company's own Analytics account and started counting from zero, letting go of everything the old property held. The lesson we took away: the business itself must hold Administrator access to its measurement tools.

Around the new website's launch in 2026, we learned another lesson too. The code that counts Google Ads conversions went live with the site, but it sat in the wrong place and wasn't actually running on the live site for about a week after the ads started running. Clicks came in during that time, but conversions read zero. Looking at the numbers alone, you would think the ads were not working at all, when in fact the counter simply had not been switched on. That is why I keep stressing testing on the live website through Realtime. Do not trust the word "installed" on its own. The same applies to key events in GA4.

For the part no tool will ever see, we use people. Our sales team asks everyone who calls or messages on LINE, "Where did you find us, and what did you search for?" and writes it down, because GA4 only sees that someone tapped a button, not how the conversation went. Numbers from the tools combined with notes from real people give the most complete picture. And any shop can start asking this tomorrow, without setting anything up at all.

A five-step plan for business owners

Sign in to GA4 with the company email and check that you are an Administrator. If not, ask the current Administrator to grant you access.
Go to Admin, then Data retention, and set it to 14 months.
Ask your web team to set up events for the LINE button, the phone button and the form, then star them as key events.
Open the website on your phone, tap each button yourself, and check in Realtime that the event names really appear.
Start asking every customer who contacts you where they found you, and record the answers in one place.

How to tell GA4 has started working for you

I suggest setting aside fifteen minutes once a month. Open Traffic acquisition and see which channels brought more or fewer people than last month. Then open Landing page and see which pages have the most key events. Finally, compare those numbers with the sales team's log of where customers said they came from.

If both sides point the same way, for example GA4 shows Organic Search growing and callers are also saying they found you on Google more often, you are reading the data correctly. If the two sides disagree, that is a good question to raise with your web team.

The clearest sign that GA4 is working for you is the day you make a decision based on it. For example, choosing to improve one service page first because you can see it leads the most people to contact you.

Back to those CCTV cameras

Cameras covering every corner are only useful when the shop owner knows which camera to check, how far back to go, and holds the recorder password themselves. GA4 is the same. You do not need to know every menu. You just need to know the three reports that answer business questions, have GA4 count customer contacts, and keep the keys with your own company. With that, the data flowing in every day starts working for you.

If you are planning a new website and would like to work with a team that plans measurement with you from day one, you can see our scope of work on the TumWebSME packages page, then tell us about your business.

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