Google Analytics 4 for small business owners: the five reports worth opening

By Francis Valente, Navaro Systems · Updated 17 October 2026

Short answer: Google Analytics 4 is Google's free tool for counting what happens on your website. For a small business five things matter: how many people visited, where they came from, which pages they read, whether they enquired, and which source those enquiries came from. GA4 answers all five once you've marked an enquiry as a key event and linked it to Google Ads and Search Console. Everything else in it can wait.

Key points

Install it once, through Google Tag Manager or your site builder's integration, and leave it alone.
Mark form submissions and phone taps as key events, or the reports can't tell visitors from enquiries.
Link Google Ads and Search Console so paid and unpaid traffic both show up with their results.
Five reports cover a small business: traffic acquisition, landing pages, pages and screens, key events, and user location.
Look monthly. Daily numbers for a small site are noise.

What GA4 counts

A small piece of code on every page reports visits, the pages viewed, where each visitor came from (a Google search, an ad, a link on another site, a typed address) and the actions you choose to track, such as a form submission or a tap on your phone number. It's free, and it's the tool Google Ads and Search Console are built to plug into.

Set it up once

Create a GA4 property at analytics.google.com in a Google account your business owns, not an agency's.
Install the tag. Most site builders have a field for the measurement ID. On a built site, Google Tag Manager is the cleaner route because it also handles the Google Ads tag.
Turn on enhanced measurement, which counts outbound clicks, scrolls and form interactions without extra work.
Create events for the things that matter: a form submitted (the thank-you page is the easy trigger) and a tap on a tel: link. Mark each one as a key event.
Link Google Ads (Admin, Product links) so ad clicks and their conversions share data both ways.
Link Search Console so unpaid search queries appear inside Analytics.
Mention analytics in your privacy policy. Australian privacy law expects you to say what you collect.

The five reports worth opening

Traffic acquisition (Reports, Acquisition): where visitors came from, by channel and source. The first place to see whether Google Ads, organic search, your Business Profile or social is doing the work.
Landing page (Reports, Engagement): the first page each visitor saw. If paid clicks land on the homepage instead of the service page, it shows here.
Pages and screens: which pages get read and for how long. Pages nobody visits are candidates to cut or merge.
Key events: your enquiries, by source and by page. This is the report that turns traffic into a business number.
User attributes, Demographic details, by city: whether your visitors are actually in the area you serve. A spike from interstate usually means an ads location setting is wrong.

What to ignore for now

Realtime, engagement rate, average engagement time, explorations and most of the home screen cards. They're not wrong, they just don't change a decision for a business getting a few hundred visits a month. Enquiries by source does.

How to read it

Once a month, compare the month with the one before and the same month last year: visits by channel, enquiries by channel, and cost per enquiry for paid traffic (spend from Google Ads divided by key events from the paid channel). Write the three numbers down. After six months you'll know which channel earns its keep, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Navaro's clients get this in a Monday report instead of opening Analytics: the numbers, what changed, and what's being done about it.

Questions people ask

Is Google Analytics 4 free?

Yes, for any small business. The paid version, Analytics 360, exists for very large sites and isn't relevant here.

Do I need GA4 if I already have Google Ads?

Google Ads shows you clicks and conversions from ads. Analytics shows everything else: organic search, your Business Profile, referrals, direct visits, and what people do after they land. Linked together they tell you which channel earns the enquiries.

What happened to the old Google Analytics?

Universal Analytics stopped collecting data in 2023 and Google removed access to its historical data in 2024. GA4 is the only version now, and old properties don't carry over.

What is a key event?

GA4's name since 2024 for what used to be called a conversion: an action you've told it matters, such as a submitted form or a phone tap. Mark the actions that mean an enquiry and leave the rest as ordinary events.

Sources

Free 60-second website read at navaro.com.au, no sign-up. Or ring Francis Valente on 0426 951 399.