Overview

If we built your site, there is a Google tag on it collecting data right now. The question most owners ask next is simple: how do I actually see it, without learning a whole analytics tool? Here are the options, from the most hands-on to the most hands-off, and what each is good for.

Tag Manager vs. Google Analytics: where your data lives

No plugin needed

People often ask for a “Google Tag Manager analytics plugin.” It doesn’t exist, because Tag Manager doesn’t store any data. It is a container that loads tracking tags on your site and decides when they fire. The data those tags collect is stored in the tools they send it to: Google Analytics 4 for website behavior, Google Ads for ad results, Meta for Meta ads, and so on.

So when you want to see your numbers, you are looking for a view of your GA4 property. There are four good ways to get one.

Option 1: View access to Google Analytics

We add your Google account to your GA4 property with the Viewer role. You can open every report, including on the free Google Analytics phone app, but you can’t accidentally change settings or tracking.

• Best for: owners who like to dig in and ask their own questions.
• Watch out: GA4 is powerful but busy. Start with Reports → Engagement → Landing page and Acquisition → Traffic acquisition. Our guide Your Google Analytics report, explained walks through every column.

Option 2: A live dashboard in Looker Studio

Our favorite for most clients

Looker Studio is Google’s free dashboard tool, and it connects to GA4 directly. We build one page with only the numbers that matter for your business (see the table in the guide linked above), in plain language, updating on its own.

• Share it by link. When the dashboard runs on the owner’s credentials, viewers don’t need their own GA4 access, so your manager or partner can see it too.
• Get it by email. Looker Studio can email the dashboard on a schedule, for example every Monday morning.
• Put it anywhere. It can be embedded in another page with an iframe.

Best for: owners who want the five numbers that matter, every week, without logging into anything.

Option 3: Your SWFT client dashboard

Clients can log in to their SWFT dashboard to see project status, billing, and a simple view of site traffic (visits, page views and top pages for the last 30 days) alongside it. It’s the quickest place to check that things are moving, with your project details in the same place.

Option 4: A monthly report with three moves

Numbers only help if they change what you do next. With our growth plans, we read your GA4 data every month and send a short report: what happened, why we think it happened, and the three changes we recommend next, in order of impact. You can reply with questions, and we show the data behind every recommendation.

What to look at in five minutes a month

• Key events (leads, bookings, purchases) compared with last month and the same month last year.
• Top landing pages: which pages bring people in, and whether they lead to key events.
• Top traffic sources: search, maps, social, ads, email. Which ones send people who act?
• Anything strange: a sudden spike or a drop to zero usually means a tracking problem, not a business problem. Tell us.

A note on accuracy and privacy

Analytics never sees everyone. Ad blockers, privacy settings and visitors who decline cookies are partly missing, so trends matter more than exact counts. We set tracking up to respect consent, and we never send names, emails or messages from your forms into analytics.

Closing

You don’t need to become an analyst to run a data-informed business. You need the right view of the right numbers, and someone who checks them with you. If you are not sure what your tags are tracking today, our free Growth Audit includes a tracking check.