Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the free-tier industry standard for understanding what visitors do on your site before they buy. Every Turbo IT raffle site supports adding a GA4 Measurement ID in about two minutes — no theme edits, no Google Tag Manager required.

Step 1 — Create a GA4 property

1. Sign in at analytics.google.com with the Google account you want to own the data.
2. Click Admin (bottom-left) → Create property. Name it after your raffle site (e.g. Stardust Raffles).
3. Time zone: United Kingdom. Currency: GBP. Industry: Online community is closest; Gamblingis fine if you’re fully licensed.
4. Create a Web data stream with your domain (e.g. https://stardustraffles.co.uk). Copy the Measurement ID — it looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX.

Step 2 — Paste it into your admin

1. In your raffle admin, open Integrations → Analytics.
2. Paste the Measurement ID into the GA4 Measurement ID field. Click Save.
3. Within ~60 seconds, the GA4 snippet starts firing on every page for new visitors. You don’t need to redeploy — it’s a config change, not a code change.

Step 3 — Verify it’s working

1. In GA4, go to Reports → Realtime.
2. Open your site in a private/incognito tab and click around for 30 seconds.
3. You should see 1 user in the last 30 minutes appear in GA4’s realtime view. If you don’t, double-check the Measurement ID for typos and clear the admin page to confirm it saved.

What we send to GA4 automatically

• page_view on every navigation, including SPA route changes (so client-side competition browsing is captured).
• add_to_cart when a customer adds tickets to their basket, with value + item info.
• begin_checkout when they reach the checkout page.
• purchasewhen an order completes, with order ID, revenue, currency, and items. This is what powers GA4’s ecommerce reports.
• sign_up when a new customer registers.

GA4 reports that actually matter

• Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition — where buyers came from. Pair with your UTM tags for campaign-level attribution.
• Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens — which competition pages get traffic; pair with sell-through % to find high-traffic / low-converting prizes.
• Reports → Monetisation → Ecommerce purchases— revenue per source/medium/campaign. Your “is this ad spend working?” dashboard.

Consent & GDPR

We respect the cookie consent banner — GA4 doesn’t fire until the visitor accepts analytics cookies. EU/UK visitors who reject get no GA4 events, which is required for GDPR. This means your GA4 numbers will be lower than your raw server-side counts; that’s expected and lawful.

Common mistakes

• Pasting a UA-XXX ID from old Universal Analytics — GA4 IDs start with G-. Universal Analytics is end-of-life.
• Setting up before your domain is live. If you set the Measurement ID before custom domain DNS is resolved, GA4 will see no traffic. Connect your domain first, then GA4.
• Treating realtime as truth. Realtime shows live activity but full attribution data takes ~24 hours to populate the standard reports.

Related: UTM Tags & Attribution · Facebook Ads for Raffles.