How to Automate Google Analytics

Google Analytics records what visitors did after they arrived

Google Analytics 4, usually shortened to GA4, is Google's free analytics for websites and apps, with a paid tier called Analytics 360. It records sessions and events and sorts traffic into channels such as Organic Search, Paid Social and Email. Key events are the ones a business marks as important, such as a form submission or a purchase. Standard reports cover acquisition, engagement and monetization, and Explore builds free-form tables and funnels on top of the same data.

The marketing manager opens it on Monday for last week's sessions and key events by channel, and the content lead reads the landing page report. An agency builds each client's monthly report from it, and the owner of a small online shop checks it when orders feel slow.

Unassigned traffic and spam leads turn up in the Monday report

The marketing manager opens the Traffic acquisition report, sets last week against the week before, and copies sessions and key events by channel into the sheet the directors read. An agency repeats it for every client property before the monthly calls.

Part of the newsletter's traffic sits under Unassigned because one link went out without its UTM medium, and finding which link means opening the email tool and reading every URL in the send. Form submissions rose, but the CRM shows half of them were spam, and the only way to see it by campaign is to export the CRM's leads and match them against GA4's form submissions by hand.

Paid social reports more conversions in its own dashboard than GA4 shows as key events, and the directors ask which number is right. The paid social manager exports each platform's campaign report to compare, every platform counting conversions its own way, and the comparison lives in a spreadsheet nobody else can follow.

GA4 reports the session, not what the CRM says happened next

Automated insights flag unusual changes without anyone asking, and custom insights, up to 50 per property, check a condition hourly, daily, weekly or monthly and can email named people when it triggers. AI overviews summarise what changed on the Home page and in detail reports, and annotations, added by anyone at Analyst level or above, mark launches on the charts.

Administrators can schedule up to 50 reports by email, but only to users with access to the property; Looker Studio, now called Data Studio, sends a PDF to anyone else.

Data Import joins CRM or CMS data to GA4 from an uploaded CSV or a connected source. Campaign data import brings in cost, clicks and impressions from ad platforms outside Google, and custom channel groups sort traffic sources by rules of your own.

Each of those needs someone to supply what GA4 does not have. A key event stays a form submission, not a qualified lead, until someone exports the CRM's verdict and imports it. A channel rule cannot say which email carried an untagged link, and campaign data import carries no platform's own conversion count. Explorations keep event data for 2 or 14 months on a standard property.

The untagged newsletter link is found the morning after the send

Yesterday's Unassigned sessions, with their landing pages, sit beside what went out that day: the newsletter in the email tool, the posts in the social scheduler, a partner's mailing. The channel owner corrects the template from a drafted URL that adds the missing utm_medium, and a month of those shows which channel keeps sending untagged links.

On Mondays, last week's form submissions by campaign sit beside the leads the CRM marked qualified from the same campaigns, so the campaign sending mostly spam shows plainly in the directors' sheet.

The paid campaigns get a third column: the conversions each ad platform reports for itself, beside GA4's key events and the CRM's qualified leads for the same week. The marketing manager answers the directors from that sheet instead of from three dashboards.

The links that break attribution live in the email tool and the scheduler

The untagged link turns up in the email tool's sent campaigns or the social scheduler's published posts for that day, among dozens of URLs. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. The CRM's lead statuses and the ad platforms' campaign reports come through logins the team chooses.

What it writes goes to two places: drafted links for the channel owner, and new rows in the directors' sheet. It leaves every lead in the CRM as it found it.

Set the Unassigned check to run the morning after each newsletter send, while the link is easiest to trace.