How to Use Google Analytics 4 to Understand Your Website Traffic

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the current version of Google’s free website analytics platform. It replaced Universal Analytics in 2023 and takes a different approach to tracking — focusing on events and user journeys rather than sessions and page views. For many business owners who were familiar with the old version, GA4 can feel confusing at first.

But the fundamentals are the same: GA4 shows you how many people visit your website, where they come from, what they do while they’re there, and whether they take actions that matter to your business. Once you know where to look, it’s a powerful tool for making better decisions about your marketing.

Finding the reports that matter most

When you log in to GA4, you’re taken to the Home overview, which shows a summary of recent activity. The main reporting area is under “Reports” in the left-hand menu. The “Acquisition” reports tell you where your visitors come from — organic search, direct traffic, social media, paid advertising, email, and referral links. The “Traffic acquisition” report breaks this down by channel, session source, and medium.

The “Engagement” reports show what users do on your site. The Pages and Screens report lists your most visited pages, along with average engagement time and the number of events recorded per page. This is where you find out which content resonates and which pages people visit but quickly leave.

The “Demographics” and “Tech” reports show you who your audience is — their location, language, device type, and browser. These are useful for informing design decisions (if 70% of your visitors use mobile, your site needs to perform well on mobile above all else) and for understanding which geographic markets are generating traffic.

Understanding events and conversions in GA4

In GA4, almost everything is tracked as an “event” — a user action or interaction. GA4 automatically tracks certain events out of the box: page views, scrolls, outbound link clicks, site searches, video engagement, and file downloads. You can see these in the Events report under Engagement.

More valuable is defining your own “conversions” — the specific events that represent meaningful actions for your business. A conversion might be a contact form submission, a phone number click, a product purchase, or a newsletter sign-up. To mark an event as a conversion in GA4, go to Configure > Events, find the event, and toggle “Mark as conversion”. Once marked, conversions appear in their own report and are tracked in your acquisition reports so you can see which channels drive the most valuable actions.

If GA4 doesn’t automatically track the events you care about, you’ll need to set up custom events — either using GA4’s built-in event creation tool (for simple cases like button clicks) or Google Tag Manager for more complex scenarios. Getting your events and conversions set up correctly is the foundation of meaningful analytics.

Using GA4 to make practical improvements

One of the most practical uses of GA4 is comparing traffic channels to conversion rates. Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition, then add “Conversions” as a secondary metric. This shows you not just which channels bring the most visitors, but which bring the most valuable ones. You might discover that organic search brings fewer visitors than social media but converts at five times the rate — a clear signal about where to invest your efforts.

Use the Landing Page report (under Engagement > Landing page) to see which pages people arrive at first and what they do next. A page with high traffic but poor engagement time and no conversions is either attracting the wrong visitors or failing to give them what they need. Compare it to your best-performing landing pages and consider what’s different.

GA4’s Explore section offers more advanced analysis through free-form exploration, funnel analysis, and path exploration. The funnel report is particularly useful for e-commerce and lead generation: it shows you at which step in a process (view product → add to cart → checkout → purchase) users drop off, helping you identify where to focus optimisation efforts.