How to Set Up Google Analytics 4 on Your Healthcare Website

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) follows an event-based approach to tracking website activity, as opposed to the previous session-based approach. This means, you have to navigate through a significantly different interface from the one before in Universal Analytics. At the same time, you need to learn how to set up Google Analytics 4 for more comprehensive site data.

You can understand why you need GA4 for your healthcare brand and how it’s different from Universal Analytics in the first part of our GA4 blog series- Google Analytics 4: A Quick Overview for Your Healthcare Brand.

In this second part of our GA4 series, you’ll also pick up on how to use Google Analytics 4 to know more about your website visitors. The more you understand their behavior, the more improvements you can make on your healthcare site to get more patients. Let’s dive in!

Table of contents:

1. How to set up GA4 for your healthcare website 
   - Manual GA4 setup 
   - With Google Tag Manager
2. How to use Google Analytics 4

How to set up GA4 for your healthcare website​

Let’s walk you through two different ways to set up GA4 on your website - manual setup and through Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Manual GA4 setup​

Follow these steps for manually setting up Google Analytics 4 using Setup Assistant:

1. Click on ‘Admin’ on the left sidebar, then ‘Create Account’.
2. Enter an account name and click ‘Next’.
3. Create a Google Analytics web property by entering its name and other details. The property is meant to house all the data for your selected websites and apps.
4. Indicate your industry category and the size of your medical practice or hospital in terms of the number of employees.
5. Pick the objectives of your practice to get personalized analytics reports, such as generating leads or raising awareness about your brand.
6. Finally, select the platform from where you wish to collect data - web, Android app, or iOS app.

With Google Tag Manager​

To install GA4 with Google Tag Manager, follow these steps for the CMS you’re using:

Practifly CMS

1. Create a Google Tag Manager account, if you don’t have one already.
2. Enter a container name, that is your domain name, and copy the Container ID.
3. Go to the Admin tab in the Practifly CMS and paste the ID in the GTM ID field under the Analytics section.

WordPress

1. After creating a GA4 Google Tag Manager account, the code snippets for the and the tags of your medical website will be displayed under Install Google Tag Manager. Click the copy icon corresponding to each tracking code.
2. On the left sidebar on your WordPress admin page, go to Appearance > Theme File Editor and click on Theme Header under Theme Files on the right side.
3. Paste the copied GTM code snippets in the and tags. Then, save the settings by clicking on Update File. You’ve now set up GTM on your medical website.
4. Next, visit your GTM account and go to Tags > New.
5. Click on Tag Configuration and choose Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration.
6. Navigate to Google Analytics 4 and go to Admin > Property > Data Streams. Choose the data stream you’ve created to find your Measurement ID. Copy that ID and paste it into the Tag Configuration window in Google Tag Manager.
7. Complete the Triggering setup and pick a name for the tag.

GA4 will now start collecting data on your WordPress website.

How to use Google Analytics 4​

Now that you’ve learned what the Google Analytics 4 platform involves, it’s time to understand how to use GA4. The information given below will help you grasp the GA4 basics and how to navigate the platform.

Utilizing the search bar

The all-new search bar on the Google Analytics interface is an invaluable feature in case you get too overwhelmed about the exact location of certain data.

For one thing, it comes with an autocomplete feature, just like Google Search does. What we mean by this is, when you start entering specific queries, such as “how many new users”, and GA4 will predict your complete query by suggesting a query like “how many new users did I get today”.

Apart from getting instant answers to such queries, you can also access specific GA4 reports and help content related to your query.

Creating new events

Form submissions and button clicks are two examples of events in Google Analytics 4 on your hospital or practice website.

Overall, the platform supports 4 types of events:

1. Automatically collected events: On setting up a tag on your healthcare website, GA4 automatically collects some event data. For example, when a certain user visits your site or app for the first time, the ‘first_visit’ event will fire.
2. Enhanced measurement events: As mentioned earlier, Enhanced measurement events include scrolls, page views, and file downloads.
3. Recommended events: These events use predefined event names and parameters suggested for different business types to track additional events across platforms.
4. Custom events: Create custom events to measure other events that aren’t available on the list of recommended events.

Viewing suggested audiences

GA4 now recommends new audiences, in case you want to expand your patient base or set up new specialties. When you create new GA4 user properties, the platform uses that information to generate new GA4 audiences that might be a good fit for your practice.

Personalizing your Reports snapshot

Another new feature in Google Analytics 4 is the ability to see the most important data at a glance by personalizing the Reports snapshot. For that, go to Reports snapshot at the top of the left sidebar, then click the Customize report icon at the top right corner.

Next, drag and drop the cards from the right sidebar to change the layout of the current Reports snapshot.

Once you’re done, tap on ‘Save’.

Note: If you want to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the platform before migrating from Universal Analytics, you can access the Google Analytics demo account here.

Setting up and using GA4 is simple

Now that Universal Analytics has sunsetted, Google Analytics 4 is the way to go. So, to properly track your healthcare website’s performance, you need to get GA4 up and running soon.

After setting it up on your hospital or practice website, you might want to gain deeper insights into your healthcare brand using GA4 reports. The final part in our GA4 series can help you out here- Part 3: Using GA4 reports for effective healthcare SEO.

And if you want someone to take care of your GA4 setup for you, we have an incredible SEO team right here at Practifly. With our decades of experience and our focus on the healthcare industry, we can help you easily manage your hospital’s or practice’s website data on Google Analytics 4. Talk to us here today!