In this article, we will show you 5 ways to check if your GA4 and GTM have been set up properly.

1. Check the Preview and Debug Mode

After you have installed GA4 on your website, go to your Google Tag Manager account and click the Preview button in the top right corner.

Open

A popup will ask you to enter the URL you want to test and debug. It might be the address of a homepage or it might be a specific page’s URL, and then press Start.

Open

A new browser tab (or window) should appear where you will see the URL that you entered in the previous popup. At the bottom of that page/tab, you must see the following badge:

And if you go back to the http://tagassistant.google.com  tab, you must see this success message.

Once the preview mode is enabled, click the event (on the left side) when your GA4 tag was supposed to fire. If you have set the tag to fire on All Pages, it means that you need to click Container Loaded.

Once you do that, you should see that your tag has been fired. Keep an eye on the status here:

2. Check Google Analytics 4 debug view

Always verify that the data was received by the platform and is displayed in reports how you expect it.

In GA4, this can be done with a feature called DebugView. It allows checking the incoming data more granularly (without waiting for hours).

You can find it by going to Admin > DebugView on the left side of the GA4 interface. Click it.

That’s the place where your debugging should take place. Do not mix this with the GTM Preview and Debug mode. They are two different things.

In the DebugView, your events are displayed as a feed/stream. Click on an event that interests you, and if you want, you can also check the parameters that were sent together with the event.

If you see your incoming events in the DebugView, there’s a very high chance that everything works fine.

3. Google Analytics 4 Real-time reports

When you publish your Google Analytics 4 tags in Google Tag Manager, it’s a good practice to check whether data (of your visitors) starts to come in. To do that, go to Reports > Realtime (on the left sidebar).

First, you will see a map and a bunch of cards with traffic sources, the most popular events, and the number of users in the last 30 and 5 minutes. You can also take a look at the snapshot of an individual user. You can do that by clicking the View user snapshot button in the top right corner.

Then, you will see a stream of all events of that particular user. You can click on them (just like in the DebugView) to see things on a more granular level.

4. Browser developer tools

This tip is more technical compared to the previous ones. You can check the developer tools of your browser and check all the outgoing requests sent to Google Analytics 4.

Since my browser of choice is Google Chrome, I will be using it to show the example.

In the top-right corner, click 3 dots, then More tools > Developer Tools. 

Then select Network.

In the search field, enter your measurement ID (because all requests sent to Google Analytics 4 are sent to URLs that contain your Measurement ID). It looks like this: G-XXXXXXXX. Obviously, you should replace XXXXXXX with your actual ID.

Check the status of those requests. If it is 204, then things are looking good. You can ignore requests with “(pending)” status.

5. Check reports

Even though I have already mentioned several other verification methods, it is necessary to check the final destination of your data, which is standard GA4 reports. This includes the Reports and Explore sections on the left sidebar.

There is a variety of different reports in GA4, and I will not dive deeper in this blog post, but here are several articles that might help: