Tracking Visitors on a GitHub Blog with Google Analytics (GA4)

This post explains how to apply Google Analytics (GA4) to a GitHub blog and track visitor statistics.

[01] What is Google Analytics?

A Web Analytics Service from Google that tracks and reports website traffic.

It lets you monitor visitor statistics for your blog.

Visit the Google Analytics site to create an account and walk through setup.

(link) google analytics
The account name does not need to match your Google ID.
Use the blog URL as the property name.
Set the reporting time zone and currency to your locale (e.g., Republic of Korea / KRW).
Business information is optional (you can change it later).
Accept the Terms of Service.
Accepting the terms completes the initial setup.
To actually monitor traffic data, you need to configure a Data Stream and create a Measurement ID.
The Measurement ID is added to the GitHub Blog config file so Google Analytics can track the page.
Google Analytics currently runs as GA4 (Google Analytics 4) and uses IDs in the G-XXX format.
The previous version, UA (Google Analytics 3), used IDs in the UA-XXX format.

When you search for how to set up Google Analytics, you’ll see many posts referencing the UA-XXX tracking ID. Since we created a Google Analytics 4 property above, methods built around UA-XXX won’t work correctly.
A GitHub Blog is a web property, so select Web as the platform.
Enter the blog URL as the Website URL; choose any Stream name you like.
Apply the Measurement ID (G-4DKPW49KWZ in the screenshot below) to the GitHub Blog.

Minimal Mistakes theme.

In _config.yml, set provider to google-gtag and add the measurement_id (create the field if it doesn’t exist) using the tracking ID above.
Add the following line inside the <script> block in _includes/analytics-providers/google-gtag.html:
```
1

gtag('config', );
```

If everything is wired up, refresh the blog and check the Google Analytics home — the stats appear immediately.