GA4 (Google Analytics 4) is completely free with no usage limits for standard business volume. Google's setup wizard walks you through creating a property and installing the tracking snippet — basic pageview and session tracking is close to point-and-click.

GTM is a free tag management system that lets you add conversion tracking, button-click events, form submissions, and e-commerce events without touching your site's code every time. It's the standard way GA4 experts add custom tracking — learn tags, triggers, and variables and you can do the same.

Google's own Analytics Academy (Skillshop) has a free 'Google Analytics for Beginners' course and a GA4-specific course, both self-paced with a certificate at the end. This is the most reliable free source since it's written by the people who built GA4, not a third party guessing at how it works.

GA4's built-in reporting UI is genuinely confusing to navigate. Most GA4 experts build a Looker Studio report on top of it instead — free, drag-and-drop, and far easier to read at a glance than clicking through GA4's native reports.

When an event isn't showing up in GA4's real-time report, describe your GTM tag/trigger setup to Claude or ChatGPT and it will usually spot the misconfiguration — a trigger set to the wrong page, a variable that isn't populated, a tag that's paused. This is genuinely one of the more common DIY sticking points.