Hiya,
Just a quick note for anyone who has tried (and failed) to get Google Analytics and Substack to play nicely with each other.
I popped into Analytics today to check on another website and look what I found! It’s real-time page-visit data coming from Substack to my Analytics account, starting last month.
Background
I tried setting up Analytics for Substack in 2021 but at the time Substack could only handle older-style Analytics IDs (Universal Analytics), and it was not possible to get those any more.
In an attempt to fix the problem, I added a Google Tag Manager ID to my Substack publication. But that didn’t work either……
Until now!
Current situation
Now I’m getting Substack page views to Analytics, so I assume that the tag manager feature in Substack has started working properly. I haven’t touched this part of my publication settings since 2021, so it wasn’t anything I did.
If you want to be able to see your traffic and traffic sources in Google Analytics, it is now possible to do so, even if you don’t have an old-style Universal Analytics ID.
Your mission (should you choose to accept it)
Setting up GA4 Analytics for a Substack publication is not an intuitive process. You need to use two different Google apps - Analytics and Tag Manager - and they have really confusing interfaces. What’s worse, the terms they use are inconsistent from app to app and their Support articles are incomprehensible!
This is a mission for a dedicated Substacker with a well-established publication (or a website-experienced semi-nerd).
The short version of how to set up (new) Analytics on Substack is:
In Google Analytics get a GA4 tag for your website (your publication homepage https://yourpublicationname.substack.com)
In Google Tag Manager, create a new account and a new tag for your publication. Paste your GA4 code (measurement ID) into Tag Manager which generates a GTM ID for you.
In Substack, paste your GTM ID into the Analytics section of your publication settings.
Detailed guidance is available in my just-published complete step-by-step guide to connecting Analytics and Substack. (And here’s a ‘friend’ link so you can read it without a paid Medium membership).
Hope you find it helpful, let me know how you go!
Karen