How to check whether a website uses Google Analytics 4

Yes, it is very easy to tell whether a website has Google Analytics implemented.

There are websites and browser extensions that tell you. If you have wrestled with the tool and its implementation, you surely know this and have used one of them.

So what is this article about, then?

Well, I recently had to audit a website and I did not have access to the tool.

And when it comes to digital analytics, the first thing I check in these projects is whether the tool is implemented and how.

With Universal Analytics, as I said, it was very simple, but what about GA4? Do you really know how to make sure it is implemented on a website?

Until now, I did not.

But now I do. And in several ways.

Here is how.

The classic, easy way

You ask the GA4 account administrator to give you access:

• Either by providing you with the account username and password.
• Or by granting the appropriate permissions to your Gmail user.

Obviously, if you do it this way, you will be able to access the reports and check that, at least on certain pages, the GA4 snippet is implemented.

Later in the article I explain how I find out whether GA4 is implemented on every page of the site.

The method without installing anything

The first thing you need to know here is that the new GA4 measurement ID format is “G-XXXXXXXXXX”, ”, replacing the Xs with 10 alphanumeric characters. It replaces Universal’s traditional “UA-XXXXX”.

So, once you are on the page you want to check, you can access the source code —with the Chrome element inspector, not with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+U, which does not load JavaScript— and search for “G-”, which, as I said, is the beginning of the GA4 account identifier.

Well, when you do that, you will be able to see something like this:

Even though at first glance it may look like the GTM call, it is not. It is the GA4 one.

And I know it is not the GTM ID because its format is: GTM-XXXXXX (followed by letters and numbers). Similar to Google Optimize, by the way, so be careful when checking it so you do not confuse them with each other (in the previous image, if you look closely, you can see calls to all three tools).

The most visual method

Although Google calls this extension Legacy because it released a new one, I find the old one much faster for this purpose (and many others).

First, install the extension. You can do it in Chrome and its derivatives (Opera, Edge, Brave…). Search for it and install it like any normal extension:

Once installed, all you have to do is go to the website you want to check and activate the extension. The “Enable” button is enough for this:

The next step is to reload the page so the extension can run.

When you do, you will see that it has collected the data and gives us the information we are looking for:

I have highlighted in red the Google tag whose ID uses the GA4 format (you know, G-XXXXXXXXXX). By contrast, the lower tag would be Universal’s (UA-XXXXX).).

This is probably the easiest method and the best suited to anyone who hates looking at a website’s code.

There are more ways, but I think these three have us well covered, at least when we want to check whether a specific website URL has the tag.

If we want to audit the entire website, we are not going to browse around and use these methods on every URL.

Not if we value our time at all.

And although for Universal there were websites like this one that did the work for us, I have not found any for GA4, so we will have to do a little work.

How to make sure Google Analytics is implemented across the ENTIRE website

The best method I know uses our trusty friend Screaming Frog.

Important: you need a licence; with the free version you will not be able to scrape the website in search of the snippet.

Right, if you have one, let us get to work.

Open the program and configure the spider like this:

1. We crawl the entire site, without leaving out any stray pages:

2. We tell it to execute JavaScript:

3. Here comes the magic. Under Configuration, go to Custom > Search:

4. A window will open where we need to add the GA4 ID —which we know from using any of the three methods explained above—with this configuration:

5. All that remains is to add the domain and start running the program:

Once it has crawled 100% of the website, go to Custom Search > Search 1 and check that every website URL contains at least once the GA4 ID we were looking for:

Can it appear more than once per page? Yes, up to twice, depending on whether the implementation is direct or through GTM.

In any case, it should be the same number on every URL of the website and if it is higher than two, something is very likely implemented incorrectly.

Conclusions

A very short article that I hope helps you check whether your website or your clients’ websites have at least a correct basic GA4 implementation.

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