If you run WordPress, there’s a good chance Google Analytics 4 was added with a plugin. The problem appears later—when a new marketer joins the team. They open GA4, see a mix of events from different plugins, maybe spot double pageviews, and quickly realize that nobody remembers exactly how tracking was wired together. Onboarding turns into detective work instead of a structured handover.

One way to reduce that friction is to keep your existing plugins for now, but start centralizing tracking logic in Google Tag Manager (GTM). A concise GTM account and container guide can become the foundation of your internal “tracking playbook”, so every new marketer starts from the same map of your setup.

Why a plugin-only GA4 setup complicates onboarding

GA4 WordPress plugins do a great job of hiding code. That’s also what makes onboarding harder.

Typical issues when everything runs through plugins:

• Tracking logic is scattered. One plugin injects the base GA4 tag, another handles scroll tracking, a third powers WooCommerce eCommerce events.
• Configuration lives in multiple UIs. A new marketer has to click through three or four plugin settings screens to understand what’s enabled.
• It’s easy to create duplicates. Connecting Site Kit on top of an existing GA4 plugin leads to double pageviews or inflated events.
• No single “source of truth”. The only documentation is “we installed Plugin X two years ago”.

From a new marketer’s perspective, the first week often looks like this:

• Trying to answer, “Where does this event come from?”
• Confusing “plugin defaults” with intentional tracking decisions.
• Being unsure what is safe to change without breaking reports.

Plugins are still useful—they’re maintained, tested, and updated—but they’re not ideal as the only place where your measurement strategy lives.

What a new marketer actually needs to understand

A good onboarding isn’t a tour of every plugin toggle. It’s a compact explanation of how your data connects to business decisions.

At minimum, a new marketer needs clarity on:

• Business goals and conversions
  • What counts as a lead, signup, trial start, or purchase?
  • Which GA4 events represent those conversions?
• Event and naming structure
  • Which events are “core” (e.g., generate_lead, purchase) vs. nice-to-have (scroll, outbound click)?
  • Any naming conventions for parameters such as content_type, form_id, pricing_plan.
• Traffic and attribution basics
  • How UTMs are structured.
  • Which channels matter most and how they’re evaluated.
• Where tracking is controlled
  • Which GA4 events come from WordPress plugins.
  • Which are fired by GTM or custom code.
  • Where to safely change things (and where not to).

You can communicate this with a very small set of artifacts:

• One diagram showing: WordPress → GA4 → downstream tools (reporting, CRM, etc.).
• One event table listing key events, who owns them, and where they’re configured (plugin vs GTM).
• A short “how to check” guide for common questions:
  • “How do I see if this campaign is tracked?”
  • “How do I verify that a new form is firing an event?”

The job of your tooling—plugins, GTM, GA4—is to make these answers easy to find, not to hide them behind wizards and onboarding screens.

Using GTM alongside your WordPress plugins

You don’t have to rip out your GA4 plugin on day one. A smoother path is to introduce GTM as the place where new tracking happens, while your plugin keeps basic pageview tracking running.

A practical sequence:

1. Inventory what plugins already send to GA4.
   Look at Realtime and standard engagement reports to see existing events. Note which ones clearly map to plugin features (e.g., scroll tracking or file downloads toggled on in a plugin).
2. Decide what should migrate into GTM.
   Good early candidates:
   • Marketing-driven events (lead forms, pricing clicks, CTA buttons).
   • Any ad platform tags (Meta, Google Ads, LinkedIn).
   • Experiments and temporary campaigns.
3. Create simple, named GTM triggers for key user actions.
   Examples:
   • T – Lead form submit
   • T – Pricing CTA click
   • T – Blog outbound link click

   Then attach GA4 event tags (and any ad pixels) to these triggers. Now marketers know that “all important interactions live in GTM”.

4. Document GTM in plain language.
   In your onboarding doc, explain:
   • Where the GTM container is installed in WordPress.
   • How folders, tag naming, and versions are structured.
   • How to preview and publish safely.

When someone new joins, you can point them at your GTM structure and, if needed, to the Google Tag Manager documentation so they can look up specific concepts like triggers, variables, and workspaces on their own.

Over time, more and more of the logic moves out of plugin settings and into tagged, versioned GTM configurations. Plugins become thin wrappers to output the container script and maybe a fallback GA4 tag.

Moving toward a GTM-centric approach

Once GA4 is stable and your team is comfortable in GTM, you can gradually reduce your dependency on WordPress plugins for tracking.

Typical end-state characteristics:

• One clear injection point.
  Either GTM loads GA4 (recommended) or the plugin does, but not both. This eliminates double counting and makes debugging easier.
• Plugins handle integrations, GTM handles logic.
  You might still use a WooCommerce GA4 plugin to push structured eCommerce events into the data layer, while GTM transforms and forwards them to GA4 and other destinations.
• Onboarding becomes repeatable.
  New marketers:
  • Read a short onboarding doc.
  • Browse the GTM container to see how events are wired.
  • Use GA4 Realtime to confirm that actions on the site map to the expected events.
• Audit and change management improve.
  With GTM versions and workspaces, you can:
  • Review exactly what changed and when.
  • Roll back if something breaks.
  • Keep a short “changelog” for tracking updates alongside campaign briefs.

For a WordPress site that originally relied entirely on GA4 plugins, this is a big step forward. You still benefit from no-code installation, but your tracking strategy now lives in one place, in language marketers understand, and with a clear path for future changes.