Most business owners have at least the basic version of Google Analytics installed on their website. However, few log in consistently, as the reports can be complicated, particularly after Google moved all users to GA4 two years ago. Those who were somewhat able to navigate the old reports are feeling just as lost as the new users.
If your analytics have been neglected for some time, you are missing out on some genuinely useful information. You don’t need to become a Google certified analytics expert. You only need to spend thirty minutes every couple of weeks to analyze a few key pieces of data and answer a few basic questions.
The first thing you want to look at is what sources are sending traffic to your website. In GA4, this is called the traffic acquisition report. Sources are broken down into categories such as organic search, direct, referral, paid search, social, and email. You want your traffic to be coming from multiple sources, and you want to be able to get a rough sense of the sources that are sending traffic to your website. If your traffic is coming from only one source, and that source is no longer sending traffic, neither will anyone else.
We should also consider which pages users are actually landing on. Many small businesses think that all traffic comes to the home page. In reality, the majority of visitors land on a specific page in response to a question they had. If a particular blog post or service page is responsible for most of the traffic, then that is the page to maintain and consider writing more of.
Regardless of the heading, it is also important to look at the page visits and the way visitors experience the site. In GA4, this is called engagement. Engagement can also be seen as the way site visitors interact with the page. If a page has a lot of visits but users are leaving the page in less than a few seconds, this means that the page is missing the visitors’ expectations. Investigating this is worthwhile because this will highlight something that can be easily fixed.
One thing that has changed quite a bit with GA4 is how it handles privacy. A lot of users now use ad blockers or browser settings that block tracking, and various changes around cookies and email tracking mean that some of the numbers are not quite as accurate as they used to be. Although the numerical values in this sense are not as they used to be, the implied overall trends should also be paid attention to.
If you find this overwhelming, you can create custom reports for only the data you want to see. A handful of metrics is often all small businesses need. Most will want to know the overall number of visitors, their geographic breakdown, the pages viewed, and the number that takes a desired action, such as contact or a purchase.
