How to Use Google Analytics for Marketing
Most marketers have Google Analytics installed, but few use it to its full potential to drive real decision-making. Tackling the platform can feel like drinking from a firehose, but you don’t need to be a data scientist to get valuable insights from it. This article will show you exactly which marketing reports to focus on to understand your audience, measure your campaigns, and optimize your website for real results.
First Things First: Don't Get Overwhelmed By the Dashboard
Opening Google Analytics 4 for the first time can be intimidating. You’re greeted with a collection of charts, menus, and customizable cards. It’s easy to feel lost before you even begin. The key is to ignore most of it, at least for now.
Marketers will spend most of their time in the Reports section, which is thankfully organized in a somewhat logical way around the customer lifecycle: Acquisition, Engagement, and Monetization. This is your home base for answering nearly all of your most pressing marketing questions. We’ll focus our efforts there to get the most valuable information without the noise.
Who Is Visiting Your Website? Understanding Your Audience
Before you can effectively market to your audience, you need to know who they are. Are you reaching the people you think you are? Google Analytics gives you the data to confirm your assumptions or uncover surprising new segments.
Demographics: Who Are They?
The Demographics reports help you understand the age, gender, and location of your website visitors. This information is crucial for refining your ad targeting, personalizing content, and ensuring your messaging resonates with the right people.
Where to find it: In the left-hand menu, navigate to Reports > User > User attributes > Demographics details.
Here, you'll find breakdowns of your users by country, region, city, gender, interests, and age. For example, you might discover that a significant portion of your traffic comes from a country you aren’t actively targeting. This could signal an untapped market or a problem with your ad campaign’s geographic settings. Or, you might find that your audience skews much younger than you thought, suggesting an opportunity to adjust your brand’s tone and social media strategy.
Tech Details: How Are They Browsing?
Just as important as knowing who your visitors are is knowing how they access your site. Are they on a desktop or a phone? Are they using Chrome or Safari?
Where to find it: Navigate to Reports > User > Tech > Tech details.
Here you can see breakdowns by browser, device category (desktop, mobile, tablet), and operating system. If you see that 80% of your visitors are browsing on mobile, you should immediately prioritize your site's mobile experience. A clunky mobile website is like having a physical store with a door that's hard to open - you’re losing customers before they even get a chance to see what you offer. Pay close attention to engagement metrics like Engaged sessions for mobile users. A low number here is a giant red flag that your mobile site needs work.
How Do People Find You? Measuring Your Traffic Channels
This is one of the most fundamental questions any marketer needs to answer, and GA4 does a great job of providing a clear overview. The Traffic acquisition report shows you exactly which channels are driving visitors to your site.
Where to find it: Navigate to Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
This report groups your traffic into default channels, making it easy to see which parts of your marketing strategy are working:
Organic Search: Visitors who find you through a search engine like Google or Bing. This is a direct measure of your SEO efforts.
Paid Search: Visitors who click on your ads from platforms like Google Ads.
Direct: Visitors who type your URL directly into their browser or use a bookmark. This often reflects brand awareness.
Organic Social: Visitors from social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook who didn't click on an ad.
Referral: Visitors who click a link to your site from another website.
Email: Visitors who click through from one of your email marketing campaigns.
Look at both the quantity (Users and Sessions) and quality (Engaged sessions and Conversions) of traffic from each channel. You might find that social media drives a lot of visitors, but your email list drives visitors who are far more likely to buy something or fill out a form.
Measuring Specific Campaigns with UTM Parameters
The default channel groupings are great, but what if you want to know if traffic is coming from your Instagram bio, a specific Facebook ad, or the link in your latest newsletter? This requires using UTM parameters - small bits of code you add to the end of a URL to give Google Analytics more information.
A URL with UTM tags might look like this:
https://www.yourwebsite.com/landing?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale
In this example, analytics will know this session came from:
Source: facebook
Medium: cpc (cost-per-click, indicating it’s a paid ad)
Campaign: spring_sale
You don't need to build these manually, Google offers a free Campaign URL Builder that makes it simple.
Where to find it: Navigate back to the Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition report. In the first dropdown menu above the table, you can change the view from 'Session default channel grouping' to 'Session campaign'. Suddenly, you can see performance broken down not just by "Email" but by your individual newsletter campaigns (“April Newsletter,” “Product Launch Email,” etc.).
Using UTMs consistently across all your paid ads, social media posts, and emails is non-negotiable for serious marketing analytics. Without them, you’re flying blind.
What Are People Doing on Your Site? Tracking Content and Behavior
Once visitors arrive, what do they do? Do they find what they're looking for, or do they leave in confusion? Understanding user behavior on your site is key to optimizing the experience and guiding them toward a conversion.
Finding Your Most Popular Pages
The Pages and screens report ranks your website pages by the number of views they receive. It’s a straightforward but powerful way to understand what content resonates most with your audience.
Where to find it: Navigate to Reports > Life cycle > Engagement > Pages and screens.
Your most popular blog posts or articles are prime candidates to be expanded into webinars, featured more prominently on your homepage, or used to build email funnels around. This report can also reveal pages that get an unexpectedly low number of views. Perhaps a key service page is hard to find in your site's navigation? This is your clue to go investigate.
The Bottom Line: Are Your Marketing Efforts Driving Results?
Traffic is great, but it doesn't pay the bills. The final - and most important - step is connecting your marketing activities to business outcomes through conversion tracking.
A "conversion" is any action you want a user to take. Common examples include:
Making a purchase
Submitting a lead form
Signing up for a newsletter
Booking a demo
Setting these up requires a bit of configuration in the GA4 admin panel, but once you do, you unlock the most valuable reports. The Conversions report shows you a tally of all the valuable actions completed on your site.
Where to find it: Navigate to Reports > Life cycle > Engagement > Conversions.
The true power, however, comes when you layer conversion data on top of your acquisition reports. Go back to your Traffic acquisition report. See that Conversions column on the far right? This is an absolute goldmine. Now you can answer the most critical marketing question of all: which channels are actually driving results?
It’s no longer about which channel drives the most traffic, it’s about which one drives the most purchases or leads. You may find that your paid ads have the highest conversion rate, giving you confidence to increase your ad spend. Or maybe you discover that organic search brings in fewer users, but they convert at a consistently high rate, proving the value of your SEO investment.
Final Thoughts
Using Google Analytics for marketing is about asking the right questions: Who is my audience? Where do they come from? What do they do on my site? And are my efforts leading to business results? By focusing on the acquisition, user, and conversion reports, you can get clear, actionable answers without needing a Ph.D. in data science.
Pulling these insights is a powerful step, but it’s still just one piece of the puzzle. The full story of your performance is scattered across Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, Salesforce, and a dozen other tools. At Graphed, we built our platform to eliminate this fragmentation. We help you connect all your data sources in one place so you can use simple, natural language to ask questions like, “Show me how much we spent on Facebook Ads last month and how much revenue it drove in Shopify,” and get an answer instantly. This turns hours of manual report-pulling into quick, actionable conversations with your data.