Once the connection is made, the figures appear in two places inside WordPress, so nobody has to learn Google’s interface to find out how yesterday went.
The dashboard widget
On the WordPress dashboard, where an editor already is: readers over the last seven days, and the stories that did best this week. Most of a newsroom never needs more than this.
The full report
OwlDraft → Analytics. Three ranges — 7 days, 28 days, 90 days — and for each:
| Readers | People, not visits. |
| Page views | Pages opened. |
| Visits | Sessions. |
| Time on site | Average per session. |
| Traffic | The shape of it over the period. |
| Most read | Your stories, by views, for the period. |
Figures are cached for an hour, so opening the screen repeatedly costs nothing and does not spend your Google quota.
Two things that change what you see
Staff are not counted. Do not count logged-in editors and administrators is on by default, on the settings screen. A team of four refreshing its own stories otherwise bends every number on a small publication.
The tag loads late, on purpose. Google’s own snippet is about 90KB of JavaScript that parses and opens a third-party connection while the first paragraph of the story is still being painted — on the main thread, during exactly the window Core Web Vitals measures. Publisher instead holds the snippet inert until the reader’s first move, scroll, tap or keystroke, and materialises it then.
Said plainly: a visitor who opens a page and leaves without touching anything is never counted. That is a real trade, not a rounding error — on a publication a share of readers land, read one screen and go. Your numbers will run a little under a site tagged the classic way, and your pages will be measurably faster. If you would rather have the classic behaviour, leave the Measurement ID blank here and let another plugin place the tag; the connection above reads the property either way.
When the numbers look wrong
| What you see | Usually |
|---|---|
| Nothing at all, on a new property | GA4 takes a day or so to start reporting. Normal on day one. |
| Every visit counted twice | Two tags on the page. Something else is tagging the site as well — clear the Measurement ID here, or turn the other one off. |
| Not connected after you connected it | The service-account address was removed from the property, or the Property ID is the G- code rather than the number. |
| Figures lower than your host’s stats | They are counting differently, and both are right: a server counts requests, including bots; Analytics counts people, minus anyone who left without touching the page. |
Next: running your own theme.