A tag that looks right in your page source can still be recording nothing
Plenty of actors have analytics on their website and no idea whether it works. The tag is there, the page loads, and the reports stay empty. That combination is more common than it sounds, and it usually has one cause.
Two generations of the same product
Google Analytics changed formats. The old one used a property id that began UA- and loaded a script called analytics.js. The current one uses a measurement id that begins G- and loads gtag. They are not interchangeable, and there is no conversion between them.
Google stopped accepting data into the old format in July 2023. A site still carrying the old snippet after that date was sending its visits into a service that no longer listened. Nothing broke visibly. The tag sat in the page source looking exactly like working analytics, which is the part that makes it hard to spot.
What your site emits now
Your site reads from one central registry of which domains are tracked. Switching a domain on is a single line there, not a change to your design, which means it works the same whether you are on one of the newer designs or one of the older ones, and whether your site is served at /yourname or on your own domain.
Separately, if you have put your own measurement id into your account settings, that is emitted as its own self-contained block. The rule is simple: it has to be a real measurement id, in the G-XXXXXXXXXX shape. If what you have saved is an old UA- fragment, nothing is emitted for it, because there is nothing valid to emit. Replacing it means creating a property in Google Analytics and pasting the new id in.
Analytics is not the only measurement you have
Your account already carries its own visitor statistics, which do not depend on any third-party tag at all. If you have never set Google Analytics up, you are not flying blind. The reason to add it anyway is that it answers questions the built-in numbers do not, such as which search terms brought somebody in, which pairs well with per-page titles and descriptions and a sitemap on your own domain.
If you are setting all of this up from scratch, the free tools worth having is the shorter list to start from. And if you do not have a site to measure yet, that part comes first.
What to actually look at
Once data is arriving, resist the temptation to check it daily. An actor website does not have the traffic for a daily number to mean anything, and watching it that closely mostly teaches you that Tuesdays are quiet.
Two things are worth a monthly look. The first is which pages people land on, because if it is never your home page, your home page is not the front door you think it is. The second is whether anybody arrives from a search at all, as opposed to only from links you have handed out yourself. Those two answers tell you whether the site is working as a business card or as something people find, and those are different jobs requiring different work.
