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How to Use Google Analytics in New Orleans

Cody Schneider•

Trying to figure out which NOLA neighborhoods are visiting your website, or whether your latest NOLA.com ad actually brought in any new customers? Google Analytics 4 has the answers, but finding them can feel like navigating the French Quarter without a map. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up and use GA4 to understand your local audience, track what matters, and make better marketing decisions for your New Orleans-based business.

First Things First: A Solid GA4 Setup

Before you can get any neighborhood-specific insights, you need a proper setup. A weak foundation will give you messy, unreliable data you can't trust.

1. Create a GA4 Property and Data Stream

If you're starting from scratch, head over to the Google Analytics homepage and create a new account and GA4 property. The setup wizard is pretty straightforward. You'll be asked to create a "data stream," which is just the source of data for your reports. For most businesses, this will be your website.

After creating your web stream, Google will give you a "Measurement ID" (it looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX) and a tracking code snippet. This code needs to be on every page of your website to collect data.

  • Easy way: If you use a platform like WordPress, Squarespace, or Shopify, there's usually a dedicated field in your settings where you just paste the Measurement ID.

  • Slightly more advanced way: Use Google Tag Manager. It's a free tool that lets you manage all your tracking codes (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.) in one place without touching your website's code directly.

2. Set Your Timezone to Central Time

This is a small but critical step for local reporting. You want your analytics day to match your business day. In your GA4 settings, find your Property Settings and make sure your reporting time zone is set to (GMT-05:00) Central Time - Chicago. Now, your "daily" report will accurately reflect a day of business in New Orleans, not in Greenwich.

Core Reports for A New Orleans Business

Once data starts flowing in (it can take 24-48 hours), you can get to the good stuff. These core reports will give you 80% of what you need to know about your local audience.

Finding Your Local Audience: The Demographic Details Report

You probably have a good hunch about your customers, but data can confirm your assumptions or reveal surprising new opportunities. This report shows you exactly where your digital visitors are coming from, right down to the city level.

How to find it: In the left-hand menu, go to Reports > Demographics > Demographic details.

By default, it might be set to "Country." Click the dropdown menu and change the "Primary dimension" to City. Now you can see a list of cities where your users are located. Use the search bar right above the table to filter for specific areas to see how much traffic you're getting from places like:

  • New Orleans

  • Metairie

  • Kenner

  • Slidell

  • Mandeville

  • Gretna

Real-world example: Let's imagine you own a boutique on Magazine Street. You check this report and see that while most of your traffic is from New Orleans, you have a surprisingly high number of users coming from Mandeville and Covington. This could be a signal to start running a few targeted Facebook ads for people on the Northshore who have shown interest in boutique clothing.

How They Found You: The Traffic Acquisition Report

This report tells you how people arrived at your digital doorstep. Did they search Google? Click a link from an Ian McNulty restaurant review? See your post on Instagram?

How to find it: Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

Here you'll see a breakdown of channels, like:

  • Organic Search: Users who found you by searching on Google, Bing, etc. This is a key indicator of your local SEO health.

  • Direct: People who typed your website's URL directly into their browser. They already know who you are.

  • Referral: Traffic from other websites. This could be a link from a NOLA blogger's guide, the Gambit, or another local business you've partnered with.

  • Organic Social: Visitors from your non-paid social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, etc.

  • Paid Search: Traffic from your Google Ads campaigns.

Real-world example: A French Quarter ghost tour company sees a huge spike in "Referral" traffic. By clicking on "Referral" and then opening the "Source" secondary dimension, they see that all the traffic is coming from a single post from a travel blog that featured them in a "Top 10 Things to Do in NOLA" article. This is incredible insight! They can now reach out to that blogger to build a stronger partnership or look for similar blogs to work with.

What They're Doing: Tracking Event Conversions

Website visits are nice, but actions are better. In GA4, important user actions are called "Events." You want to track events that are directly related to your business goals, like form submissions, phone number clicks, or online purchases.

GA4 automatically tracks some events like page_view and scroll, but you should set up custom events for what matters to you. Common examples for local businesses include:

  • generate_lead for when someone fills out your contact form

  • click_to_call for when someone clicks your phone number on a mobile device

  • purchase for e-commerce transactions

  • begin_checkout when someone starts the buying process

Once you've set up events, you need to mark a few of them as "Conversions" in the admin section. A conversion is simply an event that is critically important to your business's success.

Real-world example: A local plumber in Old Jefferson wants more emergency calls. They set an event that fires every time someone clicks on their phone number link (<a href="tel:...">). They mark this click_to_call event as a conversion. Now, in the Traffic Acquisition report, they can see exactly which channels — like their "plumber New Orleans" Google Ads campaign — are driving the most valuable clicks.

Putting It All Together: Tracking a NOLA Marketing Campaign

The real power of GA4 comes from combining these reports to see the full story of your marketing efforts. The best way to do this is with UTM parameters.

What are UTM Parameters?

UTM parameters are simple tags you add to the end of a URL to tell Google Analytics exactly where that traffic came from. It's like putting a unique identifier on every one of your marketing links.

A URL with UTMs might look like this:

https://www.yournolasite.com/special-offer?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=jazzfest_2024

The key parts are:

  • utm_source: The platform the traffic is from (e.g., facebook, newsletter, google)

  • utm_medium: The type of link (e.g., cpc for a paid ad, social for a profile link, email)

  • utm_campaign: The name of your specific campaign (e.g., jazzfest_2024, spring_sale)

You can use Google's free Campaign URL Builder to create these links easily.

Tracking a Mardi Gras King Cake Promotion

Let's say you're a bakery in Mid-City that ships King Cakes. You launch a campaign for Mardi Gras with a few different online promotions.

  1. You run Instagram ads targeting locals and NOLA ex-pats. You use a URL with utm_campaign=mardigras_ig_ads.

  2. You send an email to your newsletter subscribers with a special offer. That link gets utm_campaign=mardigras_email_promo.

  3. You partner with a local food influencer who posts a link. They get a URL with utm_campaign=nolaeats_influencer.

After a week, you log into GA4 and go to your Traffic Acquisition report. You change the primary dimension to "Session campaign." You'll see precise data for each of those three campaigns — how many users they brought in, how long those users stayed, and, most importantly, how many purchase conversions each one generated. You can now see with 100% clarity that your email promo drove the most sales, while the influencer drove a lot of traffic but fewer conversions. That's a real, actionable business insight!

Final Thoughts

Using Google Analytics for your New Orleans business means skipping past the vanity metrics and focusing on the reports that answer real-world questions like where are my customers, how did they find me, and are my marketing efforts actually working? By setting things up correctly and using location reports, acquisition data, and campaign tracking, you can swap guesswork for confident, data-driven decisions that help you connect with more locals.

Of course, becoming fully comfortable with GA4 takes time, and you might not have hours to spend digging through reports. At Graphed, we tackle this by connecting directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads. We turn the complex work of building reports into a simple conversation. You can just ask, "Show me my top converting campaigns in Louisiana for the last month," and get a live, automated dashboard in seconds rather than spending thirty minutes clicking around in GA4. It lets your whole team get answers and check performance without needing any data training.