Google Analytics 4 for Local Government: What Clerks Should Actually Look At

If you set up Google Analytics on your town’s website a few years back and haven’t looked at it since, here’s the important part: the old version is gone. Universal Analytics — the version most people learned — stopped collecting data on July 1, 2023. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is now the only version there is. If your site’s analytics haven’t been showing new numbers, this is almost certainly why.

The good news is that GA4 isn’t complicated once you know where to look. You don’t need to be technical to use it — you just need to know which handful of reports actually answer the questions a clerk or administrator cares about. This guide covers both: getting GA4 in place, and where to click once it’s there.

Getting GA4 set up

GA4 works by placing a small tracking tag on your website that reports visits back to a “property” in your Google Analytics account. Setting this up involves creating a free Google Analytics account (or a new GA4 property inside an existing one), then adding the tracking tag to your site — usually through Google Tag Manager or by pasting a snippet of code into the site’s header.

If your website is hosted by a vendor, ask them whether analytics is already set up and whether you have access to the account — many hosting providers install this for clients as part of onboarding. Town Web sets up GA4 tracking for the towns we host, so if you’re a Town Web client and aren’t sure whether you have access to your analytics, reach out and we can point you to it.

Where to actually look in GA4

GA4’s menu can feel busier than the old interface. For day-to-day municipal use, you really only need a handful of reports. Here’s where to find them and what each one tells you.

Realtime

Under Reports → Realtime, you can see who’s on your site right now — how many visitors, and roughly what they’re looking at. This is useful in a narrow but real way: if you just posted a road closure notice, an emergency alert, or a meeting agenda, Realtime confirms people are finding it. It’s also the fastest way to check that your GA4 tag is actually working after setup.

Pages and screens (your most-visited pages)

Under Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens, you’ll see which pages on your site get the most traffic. For a municipal site, this is often the most useful report there is. It tells you what residents are actually coming for — trash and recycling schedules, meeting agendas, permit forms, tax payment pages, the clerk’s contact information. If a page most residents use is buried three clicks deep, this report is your evidence to move it closer to the homepage. Likewise, if something you assumed was popular barely gets visited, that’s worth knowing too.

Acquisition (how people find your site)

Under Reports → Acquisition, you can see how visitors arrived — direct traffic (they typed your address or used a bookmark), organic search (they searched on Google), referral (they clicked a link from another site), or social. This helps you understand whether residents are finding your site through search, through links you’ve shared on Facebook or elsewhere, or by going straight there. It’s a reasonable gut check on whether outside links and social posts are actually driving anyone to the site.

Tech → device category (mobile vs. desktop)

Under Reports → Tech → Overview (or Tech details), GA4 breaks visits down by device category — mobile, desktop, tablet. Most town sites see a substantial share of mobile traffic. If that’s true for yours, it’s a good reason to make sure your site is genuinely usable on a phone — readable text, tappable buttons, forms that don’t require pinching and zooming. A modern, responsive site handles this automatically, but it’s worth checking your own numbers rather than assuming.

Demographics → geography (are visitors actually local?)

Under Reports → User → Demographics, you can see the general location of your visitors — city, region, country. For a municipal site, this is a useful sanity check: are the people visiting your site mostly local, or are you seeing a lot of traffic from elsewhere (which might mean search bots, out-of-town research, or something else worth a second look)?

Working with date ranges

Every report in GA4 has a date range selector, usually in the top right of the screen. You can set a custom range — say, the two weeks around a big town meeting or a snow emergency — and GA4 also lets you turn on “Compare,” which overlays the previous period so you can see whether traffic actually spiked or just looks that way. This is the simplest way to confirm something you already suspect: that visits jumped around a specific meeting, storm, or announcement.

Practical ways to use this

A few concrete habits worth building:

• Check Pages and screens every few months. If the same handful of pages keep showing up — agendas, forms, trash schedules — make sure those stay easy to find from the homepage, even as other content changes.
• Watch your mobile share. If mobile is a large chunk of your traffic, treat mobile usability as a real requirement, not an afterthought.
• Use Realtime and date comparisons around meetings and emergencies. It’s a simple way to confirm that residents are finding time-sensitive information when it matters.

None of this requires becoming a data analyst. GA4 is free, and once you know these five or six spots, checking in on your site’s traffic takes a few minutes.

If your town’s website needs a refresh — or if you’re not sure whether GA4 is even set up on your current site — request a free, no-obligation quote from Town Web. Our municipal website hosting includes analytics setup, so you’re not left guessing.

Ready to modernize your municipal website? Request a Quote or Book a Demo — 800+ municipalities have, since 2007.