Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics tool that helps website owners track their website traffic and user behavior. It can collect data on how users interact with your website, including:
- How many users visit your website every week or every month
- Which pages users visit, and which pages are most popular
- How long users stay on your website
- Demographics about your website visitors, like their geographic location, age, or gender
- What type of technology your visitors use, such as iOS, Android, desktop, or mobile
Note—Google Analytics is often referred to as “GA4”, referring to “Google Analytics 4”, the current major version of Google. The previous major version was called “Universal Analytics”, often referred to as “UA”. UA is no longer used, and GA4 is the only version available from Google now.
You can set up Google Analytics on any website. Follow Google’s installation guide, or reach out to us for help.
How to Use Google Analytics
Here’s a quick overview of how to use Google Analytics, how to read major Google Analytics data, and what it means. Once you’re logged in to Google Analytics, you will see a menu on the left-hand side.
Major metrics that will be most useful can be found under “Reports”.
Acquisition Metrics
Once you’re inside reports, click on “Acquisition” to see how traffic is getting to your site.
One thing to notice—on the top right is a date field. This is the time period you’re viewing. In the screenshot above, we’re viewing all data from Oct 23 – Nov 19. You can click on this date to adjust the time period.
New User Acquisition
Look at “New Users”. These numbers are the number of new users, coming to the site for the first time, from different sources.
Here, you can see that 2K (you can hover over the numbers to get more exact figures) users came from a “Direct” source, 378 came from “Organic Search”, 27 came from “Referral”, and 16 came from “Organic Social”. Here’s a quick explanation of each type of traffic.
- Direct: Visitors who type your website URL directly into their browser or use a bookmark.
- Organic Search: Visitors who find your site through unpaid search engine results (e.g., Google search).
- Referral: Visitors who come to your site by clicking a link on another website.
- Organic Social: Visitors who find your site through unpaid posts on social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram).
Session Acquisition
Sessions are the number of different browser sessions initiated by users during the time period you’ve selected. For instance, if you browse a website, close the tab and leave to get lunch, then come back and re-open the website, you are one user, but you’ve initiated two sessions. See sessions here:
So, your number of sessions is always equal to or higher than the number of new users.
Comparing Data
One of the great things about Google Analytics is it makes it very easy to compare data across time periods. Simply select the date filter at the top right, update your date, then turn on “Compare”. You can select “Preceding Period” or one of the other options, such as “Preceding period (match day of week)”.
Once you’ve selected comparative data, you will be able to view the change in metrics from one time period to the next. Here, as you can see, the month of October did comparatively better than the month of September.
A quick word on why matching the day of the week in your comparison data may be useful. As an example, if you run a business that is very busy on the weekends, but slower during the week, such as a waterpark or theme park, you can get very inaccurate comparisons by comparing a time period including a weekend with a time period including only weekdays. However, if you have an online ecommerce business that is steady regardless of the day of the week, you may not need to select this option.
Engagement Overview
After Acquisition, the next major section in Google Analytics is Engagement. This section shows how engaged users are with the site—how long they stay and how much they interact. Let’s go to Engagement > Overview to check it out.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the user engagement metrics:
- User Stickiness: Tracks how often visitors return, measured as daily (DAU), weekly (WAU), or monthly (MAU) active users.
- Average Engagement Time: How long, on average, a visitor spends actively interacting with your website.
- Engaged Sessions per User: How often each user comes back or stays engaged on your site.
- Active Users: The number of people currently browsing your site (e.g., in the last 30 minutes).
- Views and Event Count: The total number of pages viewed (views) and actions taken (event count), like clicks or scrolling.
- Event Details: This lists specific actions users performed, like viewing pages, starting a session, or submitting forms.
- User Activity Over Time: A graph showing how many people visited your site over the selected timeframe (daily, weekly, etc.).
Monetization & Retention
The next two sections, Monetization and Retention, require more advanced setup or longer-term tracking. So, for the purposes of this being an introductory tutorial, let’s skip over them for now. However, we’ll quickly explain what these do:
- Monetization: Tracks your website’s revenue and transaction data, helping you understand how users generate income for your business.
- Retention: Analyzes how often users return to your website over time. So, these are metrics that show their loyalty and long-term engagement.
User Attributes
Now, let’s take a look at our user attributes. This section allows us to see where users come from—their country, cities, genders, interests, ages, and languages. Depending on how much information is available, some of these sections may not have data.
Tech
One final section that is highly interesting is the “Tech” section. Here, you can see the Tech > Overview screen. On this screen, you can see the distribution of users across mobile vs. desktop. This will be different for different audience demographics. Surprisingly, for this example website, there are significantly more desktop than mobile users. You can see screen resolution—the most common screen resolution here is 1280×960. You can also see that the vast majority of users are using the Chrome browser. The Tech section can help give you a sense of how to best serve your users.
Creating a Scorecard
How do you regularly review and track all this data? The brilliant Entrepreneurial Operating System has a brilliant concept called a “Scorecard”. The idea is that you identify just a handful of numbers—ideally up to five—that are most representative of the health and growth of your business.
The idea of a scorecard is that if you were stuck on a desert island and could only receive five numbers in a message in a bottle, you should pick five metrics that would tell you the most about how your business is doing.
Similarly, we recommend selecting a few key metrics and reviewing them regularly. With our monthly clients, we will create a scorecard and regularly work to optimize for these key metrics. If you focus on the few metrics that matter most, your efforts will be focused, purposeful, and decisive.
Identify a few numbers—such as New Organic Users, or User Engagement—and work on your SEO optimization to boost these numbers. Review numbers monthly or weekly to stay on top of the data.
Ultimately, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”. Using Google Analytics can be foundational to improving your website’s SEO and traffic.
And as always, if you want help deciphering your GA4 data or creating a custom action plan, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Emberly team.
