How to Use Google Analytics for Website

So, you’ve set up Google Analytics on your website, but now you’re staring at a dozen charts and wondering, "What do I actually do with all this?" You're definitely not alone. This guide skips the technical deep-dives and focuses on how to find the practical, actionable insights you need to understand your audience and grow your website traffic. We'll cover the essential reports and metrics you need to check to go from data-overwhelmed to data-informed.

First, a Quick Tour of the Google Analytics 4 Interface

If you've used Google Analytics before, you probably noticed the dramatic shift from the old "Universal Analytics" (UA) to the new "Google Analytics 4". The big change is the move from a session-based model (think of a website "visit" as one unit) to an event-based model. In GA4, everything is an "event" - a page view is an event, a button click is an event, a scroll is an event, and a purchase is an event. This gives you a much more flexible and visitor-centric view of what’s happening on your site.

When you log in, you’ll primarily use the left-hand navigation panel. Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Home: This is your high-level dashboard. It gives you a quick snapshot of traffic, users, and top-performing pages. Think of it as your "good morning" coffee report to see if everything is on track.
• Reports: This section contains all the pre-built, standard reports you’ll use most often. It’s where you'll find answers to common questions about traffic sources, user engagement, and conversions.
• Explore: This is an advanced area where you can build custom reports from scratch. Once you’re comfortable with the standard reports, you’ll come here to dig deeper with funnel analyses, path explorations, and more.
• Advertising: This workspace is dedicated to understanding the performance of your paid campaigns and comparing attribution models.

For now, we'll spend most of our time in the Reports section, as it holds the key to answering your most immediate questions.

The Four Core Metrics Every Website Owner Needs to Understand

Before diving into specific reports, let's get clear on a few foundational metrics. Understanding these terms will make navigating GA4 much less intimidating.

1. Users

This metric tells you how many unique individuals visited your website during a specific time period. If one person visits your site from their laptop on Monday and again from their phone on Tuesday, Google Analytics will track them as a single user. This is a great metric for understanding the overall size of your audience.

2. Sessions

A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given timeframe. It begins when a user arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. If that same user comes to your site on Monday morning to read a blog post, then comes back Monday afternoon to browse a product page, that would count as two separate sessions from one user.

3. Engaged Sessions & Engagement Rate

This is a major improvement in GA4 and a much smarter metric than the old "Bounce Rate." A session is counted as "engaged" if the visitor does one of the following:

• Stays on your site for longer than 10 seconds.
• Completes a conversion event (like submitting a form).
• Views at least two pages.

The Engagement Rate is simply the percentage of sessions that were engaged. Forget worrying about why people leave, engagement rate tells you who is actually finding value in your site and sticking around.

4. Events & Conversions

An event is any distinct user action. Out of the box, GA4 tracks events like page_view, scroll (when a user scrolls 90% of the way down a page), and session_start. A conversion is just an event that you’ve marked as particularly valuable to your business, like a purchase, a form_submission, or a newsletter_signup.

Where Is My Traffic Coming From? The Traffic Acquisition Report

This is usually the first and most important question for any website owner. Figuring out which channels bring you the most visitors is critical for deciding where to focus your marketing efforts. GA4 makes this easy.

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

This report breaks down traffic by its source. You'll see a table with "Session default channel group" on the left. Here’s a quick guide to what the most common channels mean:

• Organic Search: Visitors who found you through a search engine like Google or Bing. This is your SEO traffic.
• Direct: Visitors who typed your URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark. This often includes people who already know your brand.
• Referral: Visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website (that isn't a search engine or social media platform).
• Organic Social: Visitors from non-paid links on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
• Paid Search: Visitors who clicked on one of your paid ads on a search engine (like Google Ads).
• Email: Visitors who clicked through from an email marketing campaign.

How to Use This Report:

Look at the table and identify your top 3-5 traffic drivers. Cross-reference them with the metrics columns: Users, Sessions, Engaged sessions, and Conversions. Do you see what you expect? If you’ve been spending weeks writing blog content, a high number of users from "Organic Search" is a fantastic sign that your SEO is working. If a recent push on LinkedIn resulted in a spike from "Organic Social," you know your campaign resonated.

Actionable Tip: Pay special attention to the Conversions column. It’s not just about which channel brings the most visitors, it's about which channel brings the visitors who take meaningful action. You might find that "Organic Social" brings a lot of sessions, but "Email" brings fewer sessions that result in more conversions. That’s a powerful insight that can shape your strategy.

What Are People Actually Doing On My Site? Engagement Reports

Once you know where people are coming from, the next step is to understand what they do once they arrive. For this, we’ll look at two key reports under the Engagement section.

Finding Your Most Popular Content

To see which pages get the most attention, head to: Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens

This report lists all the pages on your website and ranks them by Views. Your homepage will likely be at or near the top, but what else do you see? Are key service pages performing well? Are specific blog posts driving a ton of traffic?

How to Use This Report:

Look at your top 10 most-viewed pages and analyze the "Average engagement time" for each. A long engagement time on a blog post means people are actually reading it. A low engagement time on a critical landing page, however, might indicate a problem. Perhaps the message is unclear, the design is confusing, or the call-to-action is weak.

Actionable Tip: Use your top-performing pages as blueprints for success. If you see that "How-to" blog posts get tons of views and long engagement times, create more of them! Place links to your most important service or product pages within these popular posts to guide that engaged traffic toward conversion.

Tracking Key User Actions

Since GA4 is built around events, you can see every recorded user action here: Reports > Engagement > Events

This list might look a little overwhelming at first, but it contains incredibly valuable data. You’ll see standard events like page_view and scroll. If you've set up custom events (like tracking newsletter signups), you'll see those here, too.

The most important action you can take related to this report is telling Google Analytics which events matter most to you. You do this by marking them as conversions. To do this, go to Admin > Data display > Events. Here, you'll see a list of all existing event names. Find an important event (like form_submission) and flip the switch next to it under the "Mark as conversion" column. From that point on, GA4 will track it as a primary success metric across all your reports.

A Simple 15-Minute Weekly Health Check Routine

You don't need to spend hours in Google Analytics every day. Forming a consistent habit is the key. Try this quick 15-minute weekly routine to stay on top of your website's performance and spot trends before they become problems.

1. Check overall traffic trends. First, go to the Home dashboard. Set the date range at the top right to "Last 7 days," and under "Compare," select "Previous period." This will show you a week-over-week comparison. Are your Users and Sessions up or down? Don't panic over small fluctuations, but a major drop is worth investigating.
2. Identify top traffic sources. Jump into the Traffic acquisition report. Is your channel mix about the same as last week? Did an email newsletter cause a spike from the "Email" channel? Is a new social media strategy starting to pay off?
3. Review top content. Next, open the Pages and screens report. Which pages performed best this week? Did a recently published article start getting views? Note any unexpected popular content so you can learn from what's resonating.
4. Monitor your conversions. Finally, check your most important metric: conversions. You can add the "Conversions" metric to almost any report, but the Traffic acquisition table is a great place to start. Which channels drove conversions this week? This final check connects all your efforts back to what's actually growing your business.

That's it! This simple process transforms Google Analytics from a daunting library of data into a quick, actionable tool you can use every week to make smarter decisions.

Final Thoughts

This walk-through covers the fundamentals you need to start using Google Analytics effectively. By focusing on answering simple, critical questions - where your visitors come from, what they do on your pages, and which actions lead to conversions - you can turn GA4 into an invaluable guide for your website’s growth.

While mastering these reports is a great first step, the process can become repetitive, especially as you start combining data from other marketing tools like Facebook Ads, your CRM, or Shopify. We built Graphed to simplify this by connecting to Google Analytics and all your other tools automatically. Instead of clicking through reports, you can just ask questions in plain English - like "Show me which campaigns drove the most conversions last month" - and get a live, shareable dashboard in seconds, saving you hours of manual work and helping you find answers fast.