From the course: Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Essential Training

Setting up a Google Analytics account

- [Instructor] Now whether you already have an older Universal Analytics account or you're starting from scratch, we're going to need to set up a new Google Analytics 4 account. I'm going to show you how to kick it off both ways, from scratch or if you already have an account. Now, in both cases, we're just going to head over here to analytics.google.com, and you're going to have to sign in if you need to, and now remember this doesn't have to be a Gmail and in fact, for work accounts, we often recommend that it's not. Any Google account will work, and if it looks like this, it's because you're starting from scratch with a brand new account. Now, if you come over here, we can show you all of the different products that is part of the Google Marketing Platform, of which Analytics is one, and so we see we have Analytics. We also have Tag Manager down here, which is an important part of this, and we have an entire course on Tag Manager, but the purpose here we're going to look at is Analytics. So we're going to come back here and click on Start Measuring, and it's going to send us here to this screen where we're going to start the account setup. Now, I'm going to pause for a moment, and I'm going to catch the other folks up to this point as well. So if you log into analytics.google.com and it looks like this, it's because you already have an account set up. So what we're going to do is head on down here to the admin, and we're going to create a brand new account here, and remember you've already got an account here. This is your older one. We're going to create a Google Analytics 4 account. So we're caught up to that same spot here. We're going to enter in an account name. So we're going to go with GA 4 Account demo. Down here we have our account data sharing settings, and you want to have a read through these, figure out which ones you like to choose. I'm going to go ahead and just leave those as the default for now. The next thing we have to do is look at our property setup. Now, unlike Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 allows you to put both web and app data into the same property here. So this property name should encompass what you plan to put in there. In our case, we're just going to put the web data. So I'm just going to call this the website to, you know, keep that clear for myself. Is that what time zone you want your reporting time to be in? Your currency and then head down to Next. It's going to ask you a little bit about your business. Don't worry too much about these. We're going to show you how to configure all of this. So just go ahead and put in whatever describes you the best and click Create. Okay, it's going to ask us about our terms of service. Go ahead and have her read through these and Accept. Now, the next thing we have to do here is set up our data streams collecting. Remember you can send data from an iOS app, an Android app or a website into this property. For the purposes of this course, we're just going to be focused on the web. So we're going to go ahead and put that in here, and again it's going to ask us for what website we're sending that in, and then I'm just going to put in here that this is the web stream, and then it's going to ask you about enhanced measurement. This is where we can automatically measure certain types of interactions on the page. We can measure scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, certain types of file downloads, and I do recommend that you leave this on. We're going to have an entire video that dives into this a bit more, but for now we want to go ahead and enable that by default, and we're going to click Create stream to create this stream that's going to populate data. From here, we're going to get this summary page. Important things here, we have our stream name. We have our measurement ID. Up here we have the fact that enhanced measurement was turned on, and down here we're going to have some tagging instructions that are going to show us how we're going to actually go get this onto our site and tag up our pages. Now, we're going to dive into that in depth in just a few videos here and tell you exactly what to do, but for now you've made it to this screen. So know that you have successfully created a Google Analytics 4 account, and we are ready to start implementing this on your site.

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