Google Analytics MCP: ask GA4 instead of clicking through it

What you can ask

• “Which landing pages got the most sessions from paid search last month, and how many of those sessions ended in a sign-up?”
• “Compare the last 28 days with the 28 before, by channel. Which channel moved, and by how much?”
• “We just deployed the new checkout. Is the purchase event coming in? Check realtime.”
• “Which events does this property receive, and which of them count as key events?”
• “newsletter_signup fires but doesn’t count as a conversion. Mark it as a key event, once per session.”

The last one changes your property, the others only read. You don’t need to know GA4’s field names for any of them. The assistant first looks up which dimensions and metrics your property offers, custom ones included, and then builds the report.

What GA4 alone can’t answer

GA4 sees what happens on your site. It doesn’t see what the click cost. Most questions worth asking need both, like what a conversion really costs per campaign, or which landing pages get paid traffic and never convert. AdLoop reads Google Ads and GA4 through the same connection, so the assistant can put both into one answer.

That join has a trap, and almost everyone advertising in Europe falls into it at some point. Google Ads counts every click. GA4 only records visitors who accepted analytics cookies, and in EU traffic 30 to 70 percent of them decline. Two to five ad clicks per GA4 session is therefore normal, not broken tracking. AdLoop’s cross-checks account for this consent gap and say so in their answer, so your assistant doesn’t send you hunting for a bug that isn’t there.

Real tracking problems still show up, for example an event that stopped arriving or a paused tag in Tag Manager. If your assistant can read your website’s code, as Claude Code or Cursor can, it compares the events in the code with what GA4 actually receives.

Google’s official server and AdLoop

Google publishes its own Google Analytics MCP server on GitHub (googleanalytics/google-analytics-mcp), and it’s good. It reads reports, realtime data, funnels and model-based attribution. Google’s developer guide calls it read-only, but the current version on GitHub can also create annotations, custom dimensions and key events once you switch writing on. Those changes happen the moment the AI calls them, with no preview and no approval. If you only need to read GA4 and you’re at home in a terminal, it does the job and costs nothing.

You run it yourself, locally through pipx or uvx, or with Docker on Cloud Run or your own server. Google doesn’t host it for you. Setup needs a Google Cloud project with the Analytics Admin API and the Analytics Data API switched on, plus credentials: your own login through gcloud, or a service account. The project also has to be set as the quota project for those credentials.

AdLoop reads the same reports, funnels and attribution included, and goes further in three places. Every change to GA4 shows up as a preview first and only happens after your approval, and AdLoop can also change and delete what it created. It checks the setup for you: data retention, a missing Ads link, streams that stopped sending, key events that never fire. And because it reads Google Ads through the same connection, it can tell you whether your key events actually reach Google Ads.

AdLoop reads GA4 the same way in both editions. The open-source version needs the same kind of Cloud project. AdLoop Cloud runs on my servers in Germany: you sign in with Google, pick the property and skip the Cloud project.

Getting started with AdLoop Cloud

1. Create a free account at getadloop.com. No credit card.
2. Connect Google and keep Google Analytics ticked. Google’s consent screen asks to view your Analytics data and to manage your Analytics settings. AdLoop uses the second permission only for changes you approve: key events, annotations, and custom dimensions and metrics. Google offers nothing narrower. If you untick it, every report still works.
3. Pick the GA4 property. You don’t need a Google Ads account; a workspace can run on Analytics alone.
4. Connect your assistant with the address https://mcp.getadloop.com/mcp. The setup guide for each app shows where it goes.
5. Ask a real question. “Which pages brought the most sign-ups in the last 30 days?” is a good start.

How changes work in GA4

AdLoop changes three kinds of things in GA4: key events, annotations, and custom dimensions and metrics. It leaves everything else alone, from data retention to users and permissions. Key events matter most, because Google Ads imports them as conversions and Smart Bidding optimizes for them.

Every change goes through the same steps as an ad change. The assistant drafts it, you see a preview, and nothing happens until you approve it, with a click on Apply in apps that show the approval card. The preview says what people tend to forget: a key event only counts from now on, and a new custom dimension only fills from the day it exists. GA4 has no test mode like Google Ads, so AdLoop’s test run reads the property again instead. It checks for a duplicate or a full property, and it refuses the change if someone edited the same thing in GA4 since the preview.

It works the other way round too. When AdLoop changes a budget or a bid in Google Ads, it offers to note that as an annotation in GA4. A month later the jump in the chart comes with its explanation.

What it costs

At AdLoop, Analytics never counts toward a limit, on any plan, the free one included. The free plan covers one GA4 property, plus one ad account per platform if you advertise. For several properties, as agencies have them, the Agency plan gives every client a profile with its own property, for $129 a month. The cross-checks that also read Google Ads count as Google Ads operations. Everything else is on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions