Many marketers struggle to understand how to best interpret website visitors in GA4. It’s a challenging system and complicated to understand. GA4 data will make more sense if you understand a few core concepts about how to interpret and read GA4 reports. Here are five key principles to know about GA4 and how to leverage GA4 data to grow your sales.
Know Your Website Traffic Cycles
GA4 data is not what it appears to be. For example, when reviewing website visitor data in GA4 you will notice fluctuations in the total number of visitors. This is normal and happens on all websites. Without looking closer at the data you will get an incomplete picture of what is working to bring qualified traffic to your website and why those numbers fluctuate.
Your website may show 5,000 visitors for any given month, but keep in mind these may not be your target audience or even humans! The largest sources of traffic are usually online researchers who have no intention to buy, or are bots. You can dive deeper into these metrics by reviewing the geolocation of your visitors. Visitor locations are easily missed in GA4, however knowing where people come from tells you a lot about user intent and if visitors might be bots.
Bots usually register for less than five seconds in GA4. When you see large amounts of traffic from one location that is not a part of your business area, or when you see time on site under five seconds, you can count this traffic as a bot. You can block bot traffic and filter it out in GA4 to get more accurate reporting.
Also, major events can impact traffic flow causing spikes or dips in your total monthly visits. Events like a conference, PR releases, news stories, social posts or media exposure and email blasts impact total visits. You can annotate this traffic in your GA4 reports as needed.
Also, be aware of user intent from businesses (B2B) and consumers (B2C). You must know the intent of traffic coming to your website. This starts by knowing if they are visits from a business or a consumer.
Finally, seasonality impacts nearly all industries impacting website traffic. You should have a clear understanding of seasonal trends in your industry and what months bring more (or less) traffic to your website.
Know the Intent of Your Traffic Sources
There are a handful of traffic sources that bring visitors to your website. The best marketers understand user intent behind each of these traffic sources and their place in your sales funnel.
The most common traffic sources are direct traffic, search engine visits, paid ads, referrals from other websites, email marketing and social media. There are two major categories driving insights from your traffic sources: people who know your company and those who don’t. Traffic comes to you because they either know your brand or because they want to know more about you. People coming from direct channels know your company. For most websites, growth opportunities come from new visits, from people who don’t know you, but are ready to buy your product or service. These are likely to come from Google search and your SEO efforts.
It is key to know this user intent and which traffic services convert best. We have found organic search visits from Google have higher conversion rates than other channels. SEO is critical to success and you must be found on Google from both people that know you and those who don’t yet know your brand.
Don’t worry too much about the ratio of new and returning visitors. Most of your visits will be tracked as new visitors, unless people are using your website to login to an account.
Know What People Do on Your Website
One of the most important metrics in GA4 is page views. Most website visitors only visit a few website pages so this is critical data as people vote with their clicks on what they find most interesting about your company. This data must be reviewed in your GA4 metrics on a regular basis.
Your navigation menu impacts the website pages people visit. You want to see your services and products pages in the top 10 along with the contact and about pages. Your homepage will generally be the most visited page on the website.
Keeping people on your website for a few minutes and having them visit more than two pages are solid metrics for most content-based websites and measure website engagement.
Monitor the Path to Conversion
Conversion tracking is the metric most often missed by businesses in their GA4 set-up process. We see GA4 data every week from new clients that do not have event tracking in place or properly configured.
In GA4 conversions are called “events” and almost any measurable activity on a website can be registered as an event. The default settings are not the best in GA4 for tracking events. Events should be key conversion points like a form submission, email newsletter sign-up, phone call or other activity that results in direct contact from a website user.
Build your website pages to meet the intent of the people on the website. People convert when they see content that best matches their needs and brings them value.
Be Ready to Learn GA4
GA4 is a challenging and cryptic system. It is built for high-level users and is challenging to learn. GA4 does not track people who do not allow cookies on their browser making things even more complex. This traffic is called “unassigned” visitors in GA4. In spite of these challenges someone on your team must understand GA4 and how to use it. Take the time to figure this out or reach out for help.
Summary
GA4 is a critical reporting tool essential for marketing success. Getting it right takes time and pays off with the key insights needed to drive growth. Don’t get frustrated and give up!
Reach out to a specialist at Intuitive Websites to help you set-up GA4 and monitor it properly so you can measure success and take the right digital marketing actions to grow your business.
