How to Check Google Analytics

Checking your Google Analytics is an essential routine for understanding how your website is performing. It’s the dashboard that tells you where your visitors are coming from, what content they care about, and how they’re interacting with your site. In this guide, we'll walk through the specific, high-value reports you should be looking at to get clear, actionable insights.

Where to Begin: Logging in and Getting Oriented in GA4

First things first, log into your account at analytics.google.com. If you manage multiple websites, make sure you've selected the correct Property from the dropdown menu in the top-left corner.

The latest version, Google Analytics 4, has a different layout than the old Universal Analytics. Don’t let it intimidate you. For regular checks, you’ll spend most of your time in the Reports section, which is the second icon in the left-hand navigation menu.

Pro Tip: The Date Range is Always Your First Step

Before you look at any numbers, get in the habit of checking the date range selector in the top-right corner. By default, it often shows the "Last 28 days." You can change this to "Last 7 days," "Last 30 days," "Last 90 days," or a custom range. Comparing performance to the previous period is also a great way to spot trends - just toggle the "Compare" switch and apply.

Key Report #1: Traffic Acquisition (Where is your traffic coming from?)

This is arguably the most important report for any marketer or business owner. It answers the fundamental question: "How are people finding my website?" If you don't know what's working to bring people in, you won't know where to focus your efforts.

How to Find the Report:

In the left menu, navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

What You’re Looking At:

You’ll see a table listing different "Session default channel groups" with metrics like Users, Sessions, and Conversions for each one. Let's break down what the most common channels mean:

• Organic Search: This is traffic from search engines like Google or Bing when someone clicks on a standard, unpaid search result. High numbers here mean your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts are paying off. People are finding you when they search for topics related to your business.
• Direct: This is traffic from people who typed your website URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark. It often represents your existing audience, brand loyalists, or people who learned about your site offline (like from a business card or word-of-mouth).
• Referral: This is traffic that came from another website linking to yours. For example, if a blog writes an article about your business and includes a link, anyone who clicks that link will show up here. It’s great for understanding your "digital PR" and seeing who is recommending your content.
• Organic Social: This represents visitors who clicked a link from an organic (unpaid) post on a social media platform like Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Instagram. Tracking this helps you see which platforms are effective at driving real website traffic.
• Paid Search & Paid Social: These channels track traffic from your paid advertising campaigns on search engines (Google Ads) and social media (Facebook Ads, etc.). Keeping an eye on these helps you quickly assess the performance of your ad spend.
• Email: This is traffic from people clicking links in your email newsletters or campaigns. If you have an active email list, this channel is a great indicator of how engaged your subscribers are.

What to Do With This Information:

Check this report weekly. If you see that Organic Search is your top channel and steadily growing, double down on creating SEO-friendly content. If Referral traffic spiked last week, investigate which site sent you the traffic and consider building a relationship with them. If Organic Social is flat, maybe it's time to rethink your social media strategy.

Key Report #2: Pages and Screens (What content performs best?)

Once people get to your site, what are they actually looking at? The Pages and screens report tells you exactly which pages are most popular, grabbing visitors' attention and keeping them engaged.

How to Find the Report:

In the left menu, navigate to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens.

What You’re Looking At:

This report lists your web pages by popularity. You’ll see a few important columns:

• Views: This is the total number of times a page was viewed. Keep in mind that a single person could view the same page multiple times in a session.
• Users: This is the number of unique individuals who viewed the page. This is often a more useful metric than Views for gauging the overall reach of your content.
• Average engagement time: This shows the average time the page was in the foreground of a user’s browser. In simple terms, it's a proxy for how long people spent reading or interacting with that page. A lifestyle blog post might have a long engagement time, while a simple "Contact Us" page will have a short one - context is important.
• Conversions: If you have conversion tracking set up, this column shows how many times that specific page led to a desired action (like a newsletter sign-up or form submission).

What to Do With This Information:

Your most viewed pages are your winners. These are the topics your audience cares about most. Can you create more content on similar subjects? Can you update these popular posts to make them even better or link from them to guide visitors deeper into your site?

Look at pages with high engagement but low traffic. This might be a hidden gem - a piece of content that resonates deeply with the few people who find it. Promoting it via social media or email could turn it into one of your top pages. Conversely, a page with a surprisingly low engagement time might need to be rewritten to be more compelling.

Key Report #3: Tech Details (How do your visitors browse?)

Understanding the technology your audience uses is not just for developers, it’s critical for providing a good user experience. This report gives you a quick snapshot of the devices, browsers, and screen sizes of your visitors.

How to Find the Report:

In the left menu, go to Reports > User > Tech > Tech details.

By default, this report is often set to show "Browser." Use the dropdown menu in the table to switch the Primary Dimension to "Device category."

What You’re Looking At:

This simple view will break down your traffic into three main categories: Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet. Pay close attention to the percentages. Does most of your traffic come from Mobile? For many websites today, more than half of all visitors are on a phone.

What to Do With This Information:

If you discover that 70% of your users are on mobile, pull out your own phone and navigate your website. Is it easy to read? Can you click the buttons without a problem? Does your menu work properly? A poor mobile experience can quickly drive visitors away. This data helps you prioritize design and user experience work that will benefit the majority of your audience.

Building a Simple Reporting Habit

You don't need to spend hours a day in Google Analytics. The key is consistency. Here’s a simple routine to get you started:

• Daily Glance (2 minutes): Log in and look at the Reports Snapshot (the first page in the Reports section). Just check the overall user and session trends. You're just looking for huge, unexpected spikes or dips that might indicate a problem or a viral post.
• Weekly Deep Dive (15 minutes): Every Monday, review your Traffic acquisition and Pages and screens reports for the previous week. Check what channels drove traffic and which blog posts were the most popular. Use these insights to guide your content and marketing plan for the upcoming week.
• Monthly Review (30 minutes): At the start of each month, review your performance for the previous month and compare it to the month before that. This helps you see bigger-picture trends. Are your efforts paying off over time? Is your SEO strategy leading to steady organic growth?

Checking your data should feel empowering, not overwhelming. Focus on these core reports to stay on top of your website's performance and make smarter, data-informed decisions.

Final Thoughts

By regularly checking these key reports in Google Analytics, you move from guesswork to genuine understanding. You’ll know which marketing channels are delivering results, which content resonates most with your audience, and how to create a better experience for visitors. These insights are available and waiting - all you have to do is build the habit of looking for them.

As you get more comfortable, you’ll realize checking GA is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. To get the full story, we have to connect what happens on our website with our campaigns on Facebook Ads, Google Ads, our sales in Shopify, or our lead pipeline in Salesforce. This is precisely why we created Graphed. Our platform connects all your data sources into one place, allowing you to ask questions in plain English - like "Which Facebook campaigns drove the most new users to my site last week?" - and get instant dashboards and reports. Instead of manually navigating dozens of different screens in Google Analytics, you can get clear answers in seconds.