Many analytics consultants only quote on request, so the only way to find out is to ask. That makes it hard to know whether your budget is realistic before you get in touch.
This guide uses Marc's own published prices, in pounds sterling, to show what each kind of GA4 work costs, what moves the price, and the running costs that sit outside any consultant's fee.
What each piece of work costs.
GA4 work falls into a few kinds of job. These are the usual ranges, from the pricing page.
| Work | Typically | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|
| GA4 mini audit | from £175 | 3 to 5 working days |
| Full 38-point GA4 audit | £600 to £900 | 7 to 10 working days |
| Full audit and fix | £1,000 to £1,800 | 10 to 15 working days |
| Basic GA4 setup | £350 to £600 | 2 to 3 weeks |
| Advanced GA4 setup | £850 to £1,300 | 4 to 6 weeks |
| GTM and GA4 setup for Shopify | £850 to £1,500 | 2 to 4 weeks |
| GTM rebuild | £1,200 to £3,500 | Agreed with the scope |
| Server-side GTM | £2,000 to £5,000 | Agreed with the scope |
| GA4 to BigQuery connection | £500 to £1,200 | Agreed with the scope |
| Simple dashboard | £800 to £1,500 | Agreed with the scope |
Ongoing support is typically £500 to £2,000 a month, and work outside these packages is quoted from the day rate, £800 to £1,200 a day. The cost estimator adds up the pieces for your project.
Audit, fix or start again.
The biggest decision is what kind of job you need, and it's often not the one people expect.
- An audit tells you what's wrong and in what order to fix it. It's the cheapest way to find out whether the rest is needed.
- A fix repairs a setup that's broadly sound: key events counting the wrong things, revenue that doesn't match, consent that blocks too much.
- A rebuild makes sense when the container has years of tags nobody understands, or the setup was never planned. It costs more up front and less to maintain.
Rebuilding a setup that only needed a fix wastes money up front. Patching one that needed a rebuild wastes it more slowly, on every change that follows.
What pushes the price up.
- More than one site, domain or market. Each needs its own checks, and cross-domain tracking joins them up.
- Ecommerce. Item-level tracking, refunds and revenue that matches your platform take longer than lead tracking.
- Custom journeys. Quizzes, calculators, booking flows and single-page apps need events designed for them.
- Connections to other systems. CRM, back office or a data warehouse.
- Consent across regions. Different rules for UK, EU, US and Canadian visitors in one container.
- Tight deadlines, and large teams to train.
What keeps it down.
- A clear brief. Knowing which questions your analytics must answer saves days. The free measurement plan template helps.
- Access ready on day one. GA4, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads and the website, with the right permissions.
- A developer who can add a dataLayer. Tracking built on data the site provides is quicker to build and far cheaper to keep working. The dataLayer specification template tells them exactly what to add.
- One decision maker, so questions get answered quickly.
Costs outside the consultant's fee.
Some parts of a tracking setup are billed by other companies for as long as you use them. Budget for them from the start.
- Server-side hosting. A server-side GTM container runs on Google Cloud or with a specialist host such as Stape. The bill grows with traffic.
- BigQuery. Google bills it to your own Google Cloud account, for storage and for the data each query scans. With sensible tables and budget alerts, it's usually small and predictable.
- A consent platform. Commercial cookie banner platforms charge a subscription, often by traffic or number of domains.
- GA4 360. The paid version of GA4, for very large sites that need higher limits. Most businesses never need it.
- Your own team's time. Developers adding a dataLayer, and someone to test and sign off.
Marc gives an estimate of hosting and BigQuery running costs for your traffic before any work starts.
Fixed price, day rate or retainer.
Fixed price suits work with a clear end: an audit, a setup, a migration. You know the cost before it starts. Project work is invoiced 50% at the start and 50% on completion.
Day rate suits work that's hard to scope in advance, such as investigating a problem, or working inside your team for a period. See contract analytics lead.
A retainer suits ongoing work: monitoring, changes as the site evolves, new campaigns, reporting. Problems are caught sooner, before they reach a report.
The cost of not fixing it.
Broken tracking has a cost too, even if it never appears on an invoice. Google Ads bids on the conversions it's told about. If GA4 counts the wrong events, or revenue includes tax, budgets move towards the wrong campaigns, and every report built on the data inherits the error.
That's why the usual first step is the cheapest one: a GA4 mini audit, from £175, shows what's wrong and what it's worth fixing before you spend anything more.
Prices in other currencies.
The prices above are in pounds sterling, for UK clients. Clients elsewhere can see the main prices in their own currency: euros for Europe, US dollars, Canadian dollars, and Australian dollars for Australia and New Zealand.