Setup is two steps — connect, then provision. Connecting authorizes ILLUMA to work inside your Google accounts. Provisioning builds everything: the tag container, the tags, the triggers, the GA4 property, and the conversions. Both live under Marketing → Analytics.
ℹ️ Note: You need to be an Administrator on the Google Analytics account and the Tag Manager account — not just on a property or container. This is the single most common reason setup fails.
Step 1 — Enter your account IDs
We need two numeric IDs so we know which accounts to work in.
- Google Tag Manager Account ID — open tagmanager.google.com and read it out of the URL:
/accounts/{this-number}/... - Google Analytics Account ID — open analytics.google.com → Admin (gear, bottom-left) → Account settings. Use the Account ID, not the Property ID.
⚠️ Warning: Account ID and Property ID are both plain numbers and easy to confuse. Entering a Property ID where the Account ID belongs fails with a permission error that looks like something else entirely.
📸 Screenshot placeholder: The two account-ID fields under Step 1, filled in.
Step 2 — Connect your Google account
Three buttons, because Tag Manager and Analytics are often owned by different Google logins (common when an agency set one of them up).
| Button | Use when |
|---|---|
| Connect GTM (Tag Manager) | Tag Manager is under one login |
| Connect GA4 (Analytics) | Analytics is under a different login |
| Both at once | Both live under the same Google account |
Each opens Google’s consent screen. Approve, and you’re returned to the dashboard with a green status pill.
📸 Screenshot placeholder: The three Connect buttons, with “GTM connected” green and “GA4 not connected” grey.
⚠️ Warning: Sign in with the account that is an Administrator on the Analytics account itself. Being an admin on a property is not enough. If you’re signed into the wrong Google account, the connect appears to do nothing and the pill stays grey.
Step 3 — Provision
Once a status pill is green, its provisioning button unlocks.
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Provision GTM only | Builds and publishes your tag container |
| Provision GA4 only | Creates your property and data stream, marks conversions |
| Provision GA4 + GTM together | Both in one run |
📸 Screenshot placeholder: Step 2 provisioning panel with the three buttons and both checkboxes.
Two options worth understanding:
- Force-create a brand-new container — leave unchecked. By default we work inside your existing container and leave anything we didn’t create alone. Only check this if you deliberately want a second, clean container.
- Also create an sGTM server container — leave unchecked unless you’re deploying server-side tagging. An unused server container just clutters your account.
What provisioning actually does
On the Analytics side: if you don’t have a property yet, we create one plus a web data stream, and write the new measurement ID back into your settings. If you already have a property, we leave it alone and simply mark your key conversions on it. Either way, generate_lead, phone_click, and call_qualified are flagged as conversions — purchase is flagged automatically by Google.
On the Tag Manager side: we create 54 variables, 28 triggers, and 28 tags, then publish a new container version.
ℹ️ Note: A real Tag Manager run takes 4–5 minutes. Google limits how fast we can write, and there are over 100 items to create. If a run finishes in seconds, it was an Analytics-only run.
Reading the result
Enriching existing web container GTM-XXXXXXX…
→ found GTM-XXXXXXX ("Your Store — Web")
Variables: 1 created, 54 skipped
Triggers: 1 created, 27 skipped
Tags: 1 created, 27 updated, 0 skipped
Creating + publishing version…
- created — new, didn’t exist before
- updated — already existed, rewritten to the current definition
- skipped — already correct, left untouched
📸 Screenshot placeholder: A completed provisioning run showing the progress log.
Re-running is safe
Provision as often as you like. It’s idempotent — it repairs anything that has drifted and won’t duplicate what’s already there.
⚠️ Warning: Because re-provisioning updates existing tags, any change you make to a
GA4 - *tag by hand in the Tag Manager UI will be overwritten on the next run. Tags we didn’t create — Microsoft Clarity, your own custom pixels — are never touched.
Re-provision after you: add a Google Ads conversion ID or labels, add a Meta or Reddit pixel ID, or are asked to by support after a platform update.
If something goes wrong
| Symptom | Cause |
|---|---|
| Connect button does nothing, pill stays grey | Signed into a Google account that isn’t an Administrator on the account |
| “Not visible to the service account” | The account ID is wrong, or it’s a Property ID |
| Provisioning button greyed out | That side isn’t connected yet — finish Step 2 |
| Run finished in seconds | It was an Analytics-only run; Tag Manager takes minutes |