How to Use Google Analytics to Increase Traffic

Google Analytics is more than just a tool for counting website visitors, it's a treasure map for finding out how to get more of them. By understanding who your audience is, where they come from, and what they engage with, you can stop guessing and start creating a data-driven strategy for growth. This guide will walk you through five practical ways to use your Google Analytics 4 data to uncover real opportunities to increase your website traffic.

Find Your Top-Performing Content

One of the fastest ways to grow your traffic is to double down on what’s already working. Your most popular pages and posts are clear signals of what your audience is interested in. Finding this winning content in Google Analytics is straightforward.

How to Find Your Best Pages:

1. Navigate to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens.
2. Expand the date range in the top right corner. Look at the last 90 days, 6 months, or even a full year to get a clear picture of long-term trends.
3. This report shows you all the pages on your site, which you can sort by different metrics. Focus on these three:

Sort the table by Views to bring your most popular content to the top. Pay close attention to your top 10-20 pages. These are your heavy hitters.

What to Do With This Information:

Once you’ve identified your top content, it’s time to put that knowledge into action. Analyze these pages to find patterns:

• Identify Winning Topics: What themes or subjects appear repeatedly in your top posts? If three of your top five articles are about "project management for small teams," that’s a clear sign you should create more content around that topic. Your audience is telling you what they want to learn.
• Recognize Preferred Formats: Are your most popular pages list-based articles, in-depth "how-to" guides, case studies, or something else? Understanding the format your audience prefers can guide your future content creation.
• Update and Expand: Your most viewed pages are valuable assets. Keep them fresh by updating stats, adding new insights, or expanding sections. You can also create "sequel" content that dives deeper into a specific subtopic from a popular post.

By producing more of what your audience already loves, you create a flywheel that consistently attracts new and repeat visitors.

Discover Your Most Valuable Traffic Channels

Not all traffic is created equal. Some sources will bring you highly engaged visitors who become loyal followers, while others might deliver fleeting views. Identifying where your best visitors come from allows you to focus your marketing efforts where they'll have the biggest impact.

How to Analyze Your Traffic Sources:

1. Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
2. Here, you'll see traffic grouped by Session default channel group. These are broad categories defined by Google:

Look at the chart and table to see which channels are driving the most Users and Sessions. But don't stop there — look at the Engagement rate for each channel. This metric tells you what percentage of sessions were engaged, meaning they lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews.

What to Do With This Information:

The goal is to find channels that drive a high volume of traffic with a high engagement rate. For example, if Organic Search is your top channel by a wide margin, you know that investing time and resources into search engine optimization (SEO) will likely yield strong results. If Email has a lower user count but a much higher engagement rate, it's a signal that your email subscribers are highly valuable and you should focus on growing that list.

You can also use this report to investigate your referral traffic. Click on the Referral channel in the table to see a list of the individual websites sending you traffic. If you see that a particular blog or website is a consistent source of visitors, consider reaching out to them for a potential partnership or guest post to build on that relationship.

Get to Know Who Your Audience Is

The better you understand the people visiting your site, the better you can tailor your content and user experience to meet their needs. Google Analytics provides valuable demographic and technological data about your audience.

How to Learn About Your Users:

1. To find demographic data, head to Reports > User > User attributes > Demographic details. This report shows breakdowns of your audience by country, city, age, and gender. (Note: You must have Google Signals enabled in your property settings for the age and gender data to populate.)
2. To see what technology they use, go to Reports > User > Tech > Tech details. You can view reports on the browsers people use, their screen resolution, and, most importantly, their Device category (Desktop, Mobile, or Tablet).

What to Do With This Information:

The demographics report can inform your content's tone, language, and cultural references. If you discover a large portion of your audience comes from a country where you don’t speak the language, you might consider translating your key pages to better serve them.

The Device category report is even more critical for traffic growth. In today's world, it's highly likely that a significant portion — if not a majority — of your visitors are browsing on a mobile phone. A poor mobile experience will cause them to leave and never come back. If you see a high percentage of mobile users paired with a low engagement rate for that segment, it’s a big red flag that you need to improve your site’s mobile design and load speed.

Let Users Tell You What Content to Create

Your website's own search bar is a direct line to your audience's mind. When people use it, they are literally telling you what they're looking for on your site. If they can’t find it, you have a perfect content idea waiting for you.

How to Find Site Search Terms:

First, you need to make sure this tracking is enabled. In GA4, go to Admin > Data Streams, click your stream, and ensure Site search is turned on under the Enhanced measurement settings. If your site uses a standard search query parameter (like "q" or "s"), GA4 will track it automatically.

1. Once it's set up, go to Reports > Engagement > Events.
2. Click on the event named view_search_results.
3. On the report page for this event, scroll down until you see the parameter card titled search_term. This card lists all the phrases people have searched for on your website.

What to Do With This Information:

Read through the list of searched terms. Are people searching for topics that you haven't covered yet? If you sell project management software and see frequent searches for "Gantt chart tutorial," but you don’t have a post on the topic, you've just discovered a major content gap. Creating a comprehensive guide on Gantt charts will directly satisfy an existing user need and attract new search traffic from people looking for the same thing on Google.

Optimize for High-Impression Keywords

Appearing on the second or third page of Google search results gets you seen, but it rarely gets you clicks. Identifying keywords where your site already has visibility (impressions) and pushing them onto the first page is one of the highest-leverage SEO activities you can perform.

To do this, you first need to link Google Search Console with Google Analytics. In GA4, go to Admin > Product links > Search Console links and follow the steps.

How to Find Your Opportunity Keywords:

1. Once the two platforms are connected, go to Reports > Search Console > Queries.
2. This report shows you the actual search queries people used on Google to find your site. You'll see four key metrics:

Click on the "Average position" column header to sort the table. Look for keywords where you have a high number of impressions but an average position greater than 10. These are your golden opportunities.

What to Do With This Information:

Keywords with an average position between 11 and 30 are ripe for optimization. People are already seeing your URL in the search results, which means Google already considers your page relevant. You just need to give it a little push. Revisit the pages ranking for these terms and work on improving them:

• Can you write a more compelling headline or meta description to improve your CTR?
• Can you update the content with more recent information or add more depth?
• Can you better match the “search intent” by directly answering the user’s question more clearly?

Improving the rank of these pages from page two to page one can result in a dramatic increase in organic traffic with far less effort than creating a new piece of content from scratch.

Final Thoughts

Uncovering an effective traffic growth strategy doesn't have to feel like guesswork. By consistently checking your data in Google Analytics, you can learn directly from your users' behavior and make informed decisions on where to focus your resources, guiding your content and marketing strategy with confidence.

While GA4 holds all the insights, digging through different reports to connect the dots can be time-consuming. We wanted to make this process more intuitive, so we created Graphed. After connecting your analytics in a few clicks, you can ask questions like, "Which blog posts drove the most traffic last month?" or "Show me my top 5 referral sources by engagement rate," and our platform instantly builds a real-time visualization to give you the answer, letting you get straight to the insights without the manual work.