Understanding Your GA4 Report

Google Analytics reports can be overwhelming. When you log into the Google Analytics dashboard to check on the performance of your website, you’re bombarded with lots of complex-looking data and graphs. Here, we’ll outline the most important things to look out for and how you can sort through the fluff to make sense of your report.

Your GA4 Report – Top 3 Things to Consider

1. Number of users visiting your website

This is the most vital metric to consider when viewing your GA4 report. Under Reports > Acquisition > Overview, you’ll be greeted with a set of data that tells you the number of overall and new visitors visiting your website within a certain period. You can adjust this period to be over the last month, week or year or simply any custom period of your choice. You can use this information to make sense of your website’s overall performance.

2. How people are reaching your website

An interesting data set to consider is user acquisition – you can find this under the Acquisition category in Reports. This will tell you where your website traffic is coming from and is split into several categories:

• Referral – when people click on a link to your site from another website. For example, if you’re listed on Checkatrade or Verified.
• Organic Search – tied to SEO, organic search is when your website comes up in search results. This does not include any paid ads.
• Direct – when people go directly to your website, for example by typing in your web address.
• Organic Social – people directed from social media links on sites like Instagram, Facebook etc. This category wouldn’t include paid social media ads.

User acquisition data helps you understand where your website traffic is coming from and whether the money you’re spending on different marketing tactics to direct people to your website is working effectively.

3. The top-performing pages on your website

If you go to Reports > Engagement > Landing pages, you’ll be greeted with a table listing the pages of your website and the number of sessions people have spent on them. This helps you to understand where people are spending time on your website and what services of yours they’re most interested in, enabling you to take advantage of this moving forward.

We’re here to help

Here at BUILT, we know making sense of all these datasets can be confusing, hence why we picked out the top three things that we believe will be most valuable to you in order to see how your website is performing. Google Analytics has a wide range of tools and data available, but not all of it is relevant and we hope we’ve made a difference in helping you understand your GA4 report. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to get in contact with the team and we’ll be happy to advise you accordingly.

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