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How to Track Your Website Traffic (GA4 Beginner Guide)
How to Track Your Website Traffic (GA4 Beginner Guide)
I ignored my analytics for the first eight months of running a website. Just vibes and gut feelings. Turns out the data was trying to tell me something useful the whole time. Here's everything I wish someone had shown me about GA4.
For the first eight months of my first website, I had zero clue how many people visited it. And I don't mean "I had a rough idea but nothing precise." I mean zero. The number could've been 5 or 5,000 and I genuinely had no way of knowing.
Want to know what my "analytics" looked like? I'd check if anyone left a blog comment. That was it. Comment meant good day, no comment meant bad day. High-tech stuff over here.
A mate of mine ruined this blissful ignorance at a pub one evening. He pulled up his Google Analytics on his phone, the old version, and started showing me dashboards. He knew which countries his visitors came from. Which blog posts they read. How long they stuck around. He could tell you that people from New Zealand spent more time on his site than people from the UK on Thursdays specifically. And here I was, a grown adult running a business website, counting blog comments like they were tea leaves.
Went home that night feeling like an idiot and set the tracking up. Twenty minutes, maybe less. A week later I'd learned two things that still stick with me. First: the page I'd been considering deleting, one I thought was mediocre, was getting more visits than everything else on the site combined. Second: the blog post I'd spent three weekends agonizing over had been read by 11 people total. I remember the exact number because it was physically painful.
Neither of these was a life-changing revelation. But one stopped me from destroying my most popular page, and the other stopped me from writing a sequel nobody wanted. Both of those decisions, informed by 20 minutes of setup, saved me weeks of wasted effort.
All of that was on the old version, "Universal Analytics." It died in 2023 when Google forced everyone onto GA4. Different product, same name. Think of it like when a restaurant changes owners and keeps the sign but the menu is completely different. People were furious. Lots of angry Reddit threads. Lots of blog posts titled things like "GA4 is terrible and I hate it."
GA4 is fine. Honestly. It's different, and the first few sessions feel like someone rearranged all the furniture in your house while you were sleeping. About 55% of all websites run Google Analytics now, something like 37.9 million sites, and GA4 adoption hit 92% among existing users by early 2025. So you won't be alone in the struggle. But the core idea hasn't changed since my mate humiliated me at that pub: if you don't track how people find and use your website, you're making every decision about it based on vibes. That works until the day it really, really doesn't.
Do you actually need analytics though?
You've got a hundred things to deal with already. Payroll, that supplier who keeps ghosting your emails, the customer who somehow finds a new issue to raise every single day. "Set up website analytics" probably ranks somewhere between "reorganize the closet" and "finally learn guitar."
But here's what's funny: you already have the questions. You probably think about them more often than you realize.
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How many people actually visit your site? Is it just your mum and your business partner, or are strangers finding you too? The people who do visit, where are they coming from? Google? That Facebook boost you ran back in November? Your email signature? And the big one: are any of these visitors actually picking up the phone, filling out the form, buying the thing?
Right now your honest answer to most of those is probably "I think it's going okay?" Analytics turns that vague feeling into hard numbers. McKinsey found that data-driven organizations are 23x more likely to acquire customers and 19x more likely to be profitable. I don't know if those exact multipliers apply to a small business checking GA4 on Monday mornings, but directionally? Yeah.
My analytics habit is Monday mornings. I make a coffee, open the dashboard, spend maybe 15 minutes scanning it, and close the tab. That's it for the week. It's the highest-ROI 15 minutes I have. A few months ago, halfway through one of these Monday scans, I noticed I was about to spend $500 boosting a Facebook post that linked to a page where 94 out of 100 visitors left without scrolling past the hero image. Killed the campaign before it launched. Kept the $500. Fifteen minutes on a Monday morning. Saved me $500. I'll take that trade every week.
Look, none of this has to be complicated. I'm not suggesting you go get a data science degree. Just... stop guessing. That's the whole pitch.
GA4: what even is this thing
So. Brief history. Google Analytics was basically one product (called Universal Analytics) for about a decade. Consultants built their entire practices around it. People wrote books about it. Then in July 2023, Google killed it and replaced it with GA4, which is a fundamentally different tool that happens to share a name. Imagine Toyota replacing the Camry with a motorcycle and still calling it a Camry. The SEO world was, uh, not thrilled. r/analytics was a warzone for months.
If you're only setting up tracking now, though, honestly that's kind of lucky. You skipped the messy transition. You'll never have to unlearn the old interface or wonder where your favorite reports went. Silver lining of being late to the party.
Here's what's actually different about GA4 (in plain English, not Google marketing speak):
The "event" thing. This is the big conceptual shift. In old Analytics, the atomic unit was a pageview. Person loads page, you get a pageview, everyone's happy. GA4 decided everything should be an "event" instead. Pageview? That's an event now. Somebody scrolled down? Event. Click on a button? Event. Download a PDF? Believe it or not, event. I know it sounds needlessly abstract. It kind of is. But it also means you can track almost any user action without writing custom code, which is genuinely useful once you get past the vocabulary change.
Sessions make more sense now. This one's actually an improvement and nobody gives Google credit for it. Universal Analytics used to end your session at midnight. Browsing a site at 11:58pm and still there at 12:01am? Congratulations, that's two sessions. GA4 knocked that off. Sessions are more continuous now and don't get chopped up by arbitrary clock boundaries.
Bounce rate is gone. Sort of. GA4 replaced it with "engagement rate," which honestly makes more sense. A session counts as "engaged" if the visitor stuck around for more than 10 seconds, viewed more than one page, or completed a conversion. Your engagement rate is the percentage of sessions hitting at least one of those marks. Bounce rate technically still exists in GA4 as just 100% minus engagement rate. So if engagement is 65%, bounce is 35%. Same data, different framing.
Some machine learning stuff you can ignore for now. GA4 tries to predict purchase probability and churn risk using ML models. You need a lot of traffic before these predictions mean anything. File this under "nice to have eventually" and forget about it.
Here's what matters: GA4 is free, runs on every kind of website, and the handful of reports you'll actually look at are not that complicated. Promise.
Getting GA4 on your website
I've walked maybe a dozen friends through this over coffee. Every single time, they expect it to be hard. Every single time, we're done before the flat white arrives.
Make an account
Go to analytics.google.com. Sign in with your Google account. Hit "Start measuring."
It asks for an account name, a property name, and some stuff about your business size and industry. I've seen people agonize over this step for 20 minutes. Don't. Your business name goes in the account field, your website name goes in the property field, pick whatever industry is closest, done. None of it is locked in permanently. Moving on.
The "data stream" part
Next it asks you to set up a "data stream." Fancy name for a simple thing: you're telling GA4 what website to track. Click "Web," enter your site's URL, give the stream a name (doesn't matter what, I usually just type the domain name again).
After this step you get a Measurement ID that looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX. Copy this and keep it handy. It's the string that ties your website to your GA4 account and you'll need it in the next step.
Stick the tracking code on your site
Different platforms, different steps. Find yours:
If you're on WordPress, grab the "Site Kit by Google" plugin. Install it, activate it, let the setup wizard hold your hand through the whole thing. No code. Probably the least painful option out of all of these.
Squarespace buries it a bit: Settings, then Developer Tools, then External API Keys. There's a Google Analytics field in there. Paste your Measurement ID, save, done. Took me longer to find the menu than to actually do it.
Wix is straightforward enough. Marketing & SEO, Marketing Integrations, Google Analytics. Paste the ID and you're set.
Shopify puts it right where you'd expect for once. Online Store, then Preferences. The GA field is sitting right there.
Custom site or access to raw HTML? You (or your developer) need to paste this snippet inside the <head> tag on every page. If your site uses a shared layout or template, you only need to add it once in the template file:
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-XXXXXXXXXX"></script><script> window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-XXXXXXXXXX');</script>
Replace G-XXXXXXXXXX with your actual Measurement ID. Copy-paste carefully. I once spent 30 minutes debugging why tracking wasn't working and the answer was a missing X in the ID. Embarrassing.
Verify it's actually working
Open GA4, click "Realtime" in the left sidebar. Now open your website in a different tab. Give it 60 seconds. If the Realtime report shows "1 user in the last 30 minutes," congratulations, that's you, and it's working.
Nothing showing up? Try clearing your browser cache and reloading. Still blank? Right-click on your website, hit "View Page Source," and search for your Measurement ID. If it's not in the source code, the tracking snippet didn't get installed properly. Go back and double-check whichever platform step you followed.
Stop counting yourself (this matters more than you think)
Here's a mistake that trips up basically everyone early on. You visit your own site constantly, checking that blog post you just published, testing a form, clicking around after a design tweak. All of those visits count in GA4 unless you tell it otherwise.
When you're getting maybe 30 visitors a day and 12 of them are you, your data is lying to you. That "spike" you noticed on Thursday? That was you refreshing the homepage nine times to see if the new banner loaded.
The fix is buried a few menus deep: Admin, Data Streams, click your stream, Configure tag settings, Show all, Define internal traffic. Punch in your IP address. Then go to Admin, Data Settings, Data Filters and turn on the internal traffic filter. Bit of a trek through the interface but you only do it once.
One catch: if you're the type who works from three different locations (home, coworking space, the coffee shop where they know your order), your IP changes every time and the filter won't catch all of it. I installed the "Google Analytics Opt-out" browser extension as a safety net. It blocks GA4 from recording your visits regardless of which wifi you're on.
The only 6 reports you need (ignore everything else)
I counted once. GA4 has something like 30+ different reports and views you can access. The first time I opened the interface I clicked around for 45 minutes feeling increasingly stupid. None of it made sense, there was too much of it, and I closed the tab feeling worse than before I started.
Took me a while to realize: most of those reports are for enterprise analytics teams and marketing agencies. If you're a business owner tracking your own website, six reports cover everything you need. I've been running on these six for years and haven't once needed the other 24.
1. Realtime - "is this thing on?"
Where: Reports > Realtime
Who's on your site right this second. Where they came from. What page they're on. Feels a bit like a security camera, honestly.
Not a report I camp in. But after publishing something or sending a newsletter, I'll peek at it for five minutes just to see if people actually showed up. It's the instant feedback loop: shared a post on LinkedIn, flipped to Realtime, watched three people land on it within ten minutes. Dopamine hit. Or sometimes zero people, and that's useful information too.
Also handy for testing. Set up a new tracking event? Trigger it yourself, watch it pop up in Realtime, confirm the wiring works.
2. Traffic acquisition - where do people come from?
The first thing I open every Monday. Breaks your traffic into buckets based on how visitors found you:
Organic Search - Google, Bing, etc.
Direct - typed the URL or bookmark
Referral - clicked a link on some other website
Social - Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok
Email - from newsletters and email campaigns (requires UTM tags, I'll explain those later)
Paid Search - Google Ads, Bing Ads
The proportions matter way more than the raw numbers here. I pulled up a client's report once and 87% of their traffic was Direct. Eighty-seven percent. Nearly every visitor already knew the URL. Nobody new was finding them through Google, through social, through links on other sites. That's not "we need more traffic." That's "nobody outside our existing audience knows we exist." Different problem entirely.
Organic Search trending up month over month is the one I get most excited about, because it usually means the SEO groundwork is compounding. And Referral numbers are sneaky good. Other sites linking to yours and sending people over, that pulls double duty. The traffic itself is nice, but those links also tell Google your site is worth ranking higher.
Annoying limitation I should mention now: GA4 won't reveal which keywords brought organic visitors. Google hides that behind "(not provided)," which has frustrated the entire SEO industry since roughly 2013. For actual keyword data you need Google Search Console. I'll cover how to connect the two further down.
3. Pages and screens - what are people actually looking at?
Where: Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens
A ranked list of every page on your site by views. Simple concept. Surprisingly revealing once you start sorting it differently.
By views: you see your biggest hits. By engagement rate: you see where people actually stick around instead of bouncing. By conversions: the pages making you money.
I've found some genuinely bizarre mismatches in this report over the years.
One site I worked on had a FAQ page getting 400 visits a month. Nobody had touched it in two years. Meanwhile the meticulously crafted service page that the team spent weeks perfecting? Forty visits a month. Forty. The takeaway wasn't "stop writing service pages," it was "maybe link to the service page from that FAQ page that everyone's already reading."
What I've learned to look for: if a page gets loads of traffic but the engagement rate is awful, something's off with the promise. The title or the Google snippet is saying one thing, the actual page is delivering another. People click, feel misled, leave. Fix the mismatch and the numbers change fast.
The opposite is more interesting though. A page with barely any visitors but a weirdly high conversion rate? That page knows how to close. It's already doing the hard part, it just needs more people seeing it. Link to it from your high-traffic pages. Mention it in your emails. Give it a chance.
And watch for the slow bleed. Pages that used to do well and are quietly sliding downhill month after month. Content ages. Competitors write better versions. Google reshuffles. You either update the page or watch the line keep going down.
4. Landing pages - the "first impression" report
Find it at: Reports > Engagement > Landing Pages
Similar to Pages and Screens, but this one shows which pages people arrive on first. Think of it as your front door analysis. Which doors are people walking through?
Here's a thing that surprises most business owners: your homepage probably isn't your most visited landing page. Blog posts, service pages, and location pages frequently get more organic traffic than the homepage. So if you've been polishing your homepage to perfection while ignoring a blog post that gets 3x the traffic... well, now you know.
Any landing page with high traffic and bad engagement rate is actively hurting you. People show up, don't like what they see, and leave. That's a bad first date. Fix the page or figure out why Google thinks it matches a query that it doesn't.
5. Conversions - the report that justifies having a website
Where: Reports > Engagement > Conversions
Every other report feeds into this one. Conversions are the actions you actually care about. The reason your website exists.
Problem: GA4 doesn't know what matters to your business. Out of the box it only flags purchase events, which is great if you run an online store and useless for everyone else. You've gotta set up your own conversion events.
What counts as a conversion on your site? For most small businesses it's someone filling out the contact form, or clicking the phone number, or signing up for the newsletter, or downloading that PDF you spent ages making. Maybe all of the above. Maybe just one. Whatever it is, you need to tell GA4 because it sure isn't going to figure it out on its own.
Setting one up: Admin, Events, Create Event. Name it something descriptive enough that you'll recognize it in six months. I learned this the hard way. form_submit_contact makes sense. event_7 does not, even though past-me apparently thought it was fine at the time. Set the trigger conditions, save it, then go to Admin, Conversions and mark it as a conversion.
Setting up that first conversion event genuinely changed how I used GA4. Before, the Traffic Acquisition report was just vibes. "Oh neat, 500 people came from organic search." So what? After adding conversion tracking, that same report told me: "500 people from organic search, 3 of them filled out the contact form. But 20 people from that one niche blog that linked to you? Five of those submitted the form." Completely different story. The channel with 25x the traffic was generating fewer actual leads. I would've kept pouring energy into organic and ignoring the referring site if I hadn't been tracking conversions. Bit scary to think about, actually.
6. Tech details - boring name, important data
Where: Reports > Tech > Tech Details
Nobody gets excited about this one. But it's caught real problems for me that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
It splits your traffic by browser, device type, operating system, and screen resolution. The kind of spreadsheet-looking data that makes your eyes glaze over until you spot something wrong.
My cautionary tale: I spent three weeks not knowing that my checkout page was broken on Safari for iPhone. Three weeks. I develop and test in Chrome on a MacBook, like a lot of people. Everything looked fine to me. But the Tech report showed that Safari mobile users had roughly half the engagement rate of Chrome desktop users. Once I actually opened the site on an iPhone, the problem was obvious: a CSS issue was hiding the checkout button below the fold. Afternoon fix. But I'll never get those three weeks of lost mobile conversions back.
Check this monthly. Compare engagement rates across device types and browsers. If one specific combination looks terrible, something is probably broken that you've never seen because you don't browse your own site on a 2019 Samsung Galaxy.
UTM parameters (sounds geeky, saves you real money)
This is the thing I'm most annoyed nobody told me about earlier. I sent email newsletters for a solid year knowing only that "email drives some traffic." Which email? Which link inside the email? Which campaign? No idea. All just one big blob of "email" in my reports.
UTM parameters fix this. They're extra bits of text you add to the end of a link so GA4 can tell exactly which campaign, which platform, which post sent the click. The URL ends up looking kind of ugly:
Your visitors never notice the extra bits. They click a normal-looking link in your email, the ugly URL flashes for a fraction of a second in the address bar, and then your page loads. Behind the scenes, GA4 logs exactly where that click came from.
You've got three tags to fill in. utm_source tells GA4 where the link lives, like your newsletter or LinkedIn or a partner's blog. utm_medium is the channel type, email or social or paid. utm_campaign is whatever you named this particular campaign. There are technically two more optional tags but I've never bothered with them.
Google has a free Campaign URL Builder that puts these together for you. Bookmark that thing. Seriously. I tried hand-typing UTMs for a while and the typos are brutal. One wrong character and your tracking silently breaks, no error message, nothing. You just find out three weeks later when you're staring at a report that doesn't add up.
Anyway. UTM war stories. I have several.
The capitalization thing got me first. Some campaigns I'd write "Newsletter" and others "newsletter." Tiny difference, right? Nope. GA4 treats those as two completely separate sources. I spent a confused half hour during a quarterly review thinking my email numbers looked weirdly low. They weren't low. I was looking at half the picture. The other half was sitting in a different row with a capital N that I hadn't scrolled down to see. And there's no way to merge them after the fact. The data goes in wrong, it stays wrong forever. Everything gets typed lowercase now. No exceptions, no autocorrect, I don't care if it's the start of a sentence.
Naming consistency was the other one. My Facebook UTMs went through three aliases: "facebook" (the original), "fb" (when I got lazy), and "Facebook" (when my phone autocorrected it without me noticing). So now I had three rows in my reports for Facebook. Three! All meaning the exact same thing, all counted separately. I taped a Post-it note to my monitor with the naming conventions. Literally a sticky note. Still there, actually, getting yellower by the month.
OK last UTM war story. This one took me the longest to catch: I was putting UTM tags on links inside my own website. Internal links. Blog sidebar, footer CTAs, the works. I thought I was being thorough. What was actually happening is GA4 restarted the session attribution every time someone clicked one of those internal links. It treated each click like the visitor had arrived fresh from somewhere new. Weeks of garbage data before I traced it back. The fix is simple but nobody warns you: UTMs are for external links only. Emails, social posts, partner sites. Stuff that points to your site from the outside.
Anyway, the before-and-after on UTMs was kind of staggering once I got everything cleaned up. Before: "email sends some traffic I think." After: "the February newsletter pulled 340 clicks at a 4.2% conversion rate, but March tanked to 89 clicks and 1.1%, so clearly something about that March email was off." I axed two campaigns entirely based on that data. Couldn't have seen any of it without those ugly URL appendages. Tedious to set up? God yes. Worth it? Not even close to a fair question.
Link GA4 to Search Console
Okay, this one bugs me. Google built two analytics products. GA4 tracks what visitors do on your website. Search Console tracks what they typed into Google before they got there. Obviously these two things belong together. Obviously you'd want to see "this person searched for X, landed on page Y, and then did Z" in one place.
Does Google combine them automatically? Of course not. They're separate products. Separate teams built them, probably. You've got to wire them together yourself.
I ran both tools independently for months before stumbling across an offhand tweet mentioning you could connect them. (This was back when I still followed SEO Twitter. Roughly 80% noise, 20% genuinely useful nuggets buried in threads that are way too long.)
The actual linking process: GA4, then Admin, then Product Links, then Search Console Links, then Link. Choose your Search Console property, pick the data stream, submit. Maybe two minutes.
What happened next surprised me. Overnight the organic search report went from one flat number ("500 visitors from Google, good luck figuring out why") to something I could actually act on. Turns out one keyword was doing all the heavy lifting. Two hundred of those 500 people came from a single search term, and roughly 6% of them signed up. Meanwhile another keyword brought maybe 80 visitors who bounced almost immediately. I'd been splitting my writing time evenly between both topics. Dumb in retrospect.
I got kind of obsessed with Search Console after that, honestly. Ended up writing a whole separate guide about it because I couldn't shut up. But that's a rabbit hole for another day. For now just connect the two tools and let the data accumulate. Future you will be grateful.
Three dumb mistakes I made (and you probably will too)
Becoming a daily stats addict
For about three months I checked GA4 every morning. Sometimes twice. Traffic spiked on Tuesday? I'd spend an hour trying to figure out why. Dropped on Thursday? Mild panic. None of it meant anything.
Daily traffic numbers are noise, not signal. Someone shares your link on a forum, you get a weird spike. Mercury goes into retrograde, traffic dips. (Kidding. Mostly.) The point is that individual days don't tell you anything useful.
Had to force myself into a Monday-only cadence. Week over week comparisons, looking at 28-day windows instead of yesterday versus today. Once I made that switch, the anxiety went away and the actual useful patterns got easier to spot. Force yourself to zoom out.
Pretending mobile didn't exist
I looked at my overall engagement rate for months. Sixty-something percent. Nodded approvingly each time. "That's decent," I'd think, and move on.
Then, one random Tuesday, I filtered by device for the first time.
Desktop: 72% engagement. Mobile: 34%.
I sat there staring at that number. Thirty-four percent. On the device that accounted for roughly two-thirds of my visitors. My mobile site was basically a leaky bucket and I'd been cheerfully looking at the blended average the whole time.
When I actually opened my site on a phone (which, embarrassingly, I hadn't done in a while) the problems were obvious. Tiny text. Buttons crammed so close together you'd fat-finger the wrong one half the time. The pricing page had this CSS overflow bug where the "Get Started" button just... vanished on anything smaller than an iPad. Gone. The one button that actually matters, invisible to like 60% of my audience.
Nobody flagged it. Of course they didn't. When's the last time you emailed a company to say "hey, your mobile layout is broken"? You don't. You hit back and google the next option. That's exactly what my visitors were doing for three weeks straight.
Anyway. Check the Tech report by device once a month, minimum. If mobile engagement craters compared to desktop, something's broken and nobody's going to be nice enough to tell you about it.
Waiting forever to track conversions
This is the one that embarrasses me most. I had GA4 running for six months and all I was tracking was pageviews. I could tell you 800 people visited last month. Impressive! Except... how many of them actually did something useful?
Contact form submissions? No idea. Phone number clicks? Didn't track those. PDF downloads? Nope.
It was like counting how many people walked into a shop while deliberately choosing not to look at the cash register.
My advice here is boring but important: set up a conversion event the same day you install GA4. Just one. Whatever action matters most for your business. Contact form. Phone call. Purchase. That one event takes maybe 10 minutes to configure and it transforms GA4 from a glorified visitor counter into something you can actually make business decisions with.
Reading the tea leaves (what the numbers actually mean)
Numbers on a screen are useless if you don't know what they're telling you. Took me a while to develop an instinct for this stuff, but here's what I've learned to watch for.
Traffic up, conversions flat. This one burned me last year. Visitors up 40% over two months. I was walking around feeling like a marketing genius. Then I actually looked at where all these new people were coming from: blog posts ranking for "what is" and "how does" queries. Researchers. Window shoppers. Not a single extra form submission. The audience grew but the revenue didn't move. Not the end of the world, but it popped my balloon pretty fast.
Flat traffic, conversions creeping up. This is the quiet win. Your site got better at convincing people without attracting more of them. (I wrote a whole guide on improving website conversion rates if that's the lever you want to pull.) Maybe you rewrote the landing page copy. Maybe you cut that 8-field form down to 3 (which, by the way, is almost always worth trying). Whatever changed, double down on it. Because if the conversion rate is higher and you can nudge the traffic number up even a little, the math gets exciting fast.
Organic search climbing month after month. I love seeing this one because it means the stuff you did months ago is actually compounding. That blog post from October? Those backlinks you built in November? They're stacking. Dig into which pages are pulling the numbers up and write more about those topics. If you've been building quality backlinks, this is the report where you finally see it paying off.
Referral traffic from sites you've never heard of. This one's a coin flip. Could be a genuine mention on someone's blog. Could be bot garbage from a domain that's just a string of consonants. I click through every single time because the difference matters. A real article on a real site that linked to you organically? That's gold, and not just for the visitors it sends. Those links tell Google you're worth ranking higher. This kind of natural referral profile is exactly what Revised helps cultivate, placing links on contextually relevant pages across established domains where real people spend time.
One page is carrying the whole site. Flattering until you think about what happens if Google decides to rank someone else's version of that page higher. I had this happen in 2024. One page was pulling maybe 55% of my total traffic, it dropped from position 3 to position 9 after an algorithm update, and my overall numbers fell off a cliff overnight. Now I actively look for underperforming pages that could take some of the weight. Diversify before you have to.
The Monday morning check (steal this routine)
People ask how much time I spend on analytics. The answer disappoints them: fifteen minutes, once a week. Monday mornings. Coffee in hand.
I start with Traffic Acquisition, last 7 days compared to the previous 7. If any channel moved more than 20% in either direction, I poke at it. If everything looks stable, I just note where organic is heading and move on. Takes maybe three minutes.
Then Landing Pages. Same 7-day view. I'm looking for two things: did anything new start getting traffic that wasn't before, and did anything that used to perform well suddenly tank? Both are worth a few minutes of investigation.
Conversions last. Week over week, how many, from where. This is where it gets interesting. If conversions dropped but traffic didn't, something broke on the site or changed on a key page. If both dropped, probably seasonal or a ranking shift. And if conversions went up I try to reverse-engineer why, because I want to do that thing again.
Sometimes, if I published something that week, I'll peek at Realtime just to make sure visitors are actually landing. More of a nervous habit than real analysis at this point.
Once a month I go deeper into Pages and Screens and the Tech report. Every quarter or so I check whether my conversion events still make sense or if my business has outgrown them. But the weekly Monday scan is the backbone. It's what actually keeps me from flying blind.
Where GA4 falls short (and what to use instead)
GA4 can't do everything and I wasted more time than I'd like to admit looking for answers it doesn't have.
Keyword data is the big one. GA4 shows "(not provided)" for basically every organic search query. Drove me up the wall for months until someone pointed out that Google hid all that data inside a completely separate tool. Search Console has it. GA4 doesn't. Annoying but that's the setup.
Competitor analysis? Forget it. GA4 can only see your own site. If you want to know what's working for competitors, you need something else entirely. I wrote about a bunch of free tools that actually do this.
Site speed diagnostics are another gap. GA4 has some timing data buried in there but it's not going to tell you that your hero image is 4MB and that's why mobile users leave. PageSpeed Insights is the tool for that.
Backlinks are partially covered. GA4 shows referral traffic (sites sending you visitors), but that's not the full picture of who links to you. Search Console has a basic version. For the real deep dive you'd want Ahrefs or Moz.
And the biggest limitation might be this: GA4 will tell you that 70% of visitors leave your pricing page without clicking anything. But it won't tell you why. Session recording tools like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity (both have free tiers, bless them) let you watch what people actually do on the page. Or you could just ask real humans what confused them. Old school but it works.
GA4 is the foundation, not the whole toolkit. Pair it with Search Console and a few other free tools and you've got a pretty complete picture without spending anything.
Seriously, go do this right now
I don't usually end posts with homework. But GA4 can't backfill. It starts counting the day you install the code. Not yesterday, not last month, not retroactively. The day you install it. Every day before that is a blank.
Those eight months I ran blind? They still bug me. Not because early analytics would've made me some kind of genius. But I would've figured out what worked faster. I would've stopped pouring weekends into blog posts that twelve people read. Maybe eleven. (It was eleven.)
The setup is 15 minutes. You spent longer than that reading this. Go open analytics.google.com in another tab, do the thing, and check your first report next Monday morning.
Something in that report will surprise you. I'd bet money on it.
