A comprehensive guide to GA4

 

 

Date: 15/11/2023

SEO Advice

What happened to Google Analytics?

For years businesses have been used to logging into their Google Analytics and seeing the same kind of layout every time they log in.
For example, many businesses will have been used to seeing the various line graphs in Google Analytics.

These line Graphs in Google Analytics would often show the number of organic visitors over say the last 10 months for example.
Pie charts were often used to show the proportion of visitors that have come to your website from a mobile phone versus a desktop as well.

Is also other important information such as bounce rate, time on-site, also how many pages the shopper visited.

These are still present but they are now in a different format which is now referred to as “GA4”.

So, what are the main differences between GA4 and Google Analytics?

Fully Customisable Dashboards

Now we have GA4, an SEO consultant or an agency can present the data how they want, for the dashboard is totally customizable

Important metrics that still need monitoring using GA4

 

A user

 

This is simply somebody who has visited your company website, it could be a shopper that wants to buy a product or it could simply be somebody that’s interested in reading one of your blog posts.

 

Session

The session, simply is a metric that allows you to monitor how long shoppers are on your website.

 

An event

An event could be many things, it could be simply visiting say the homepage, or clicking on say a contact form to get somebody from the company to ring that person back could also be an event.

 

Views

This simply refers to the total number of pages or blog posts, that the shopper has visited.

 

Engaged session

When you talk to any good digital marketing agency, they will tell you it’s crucial to reduce the company’s “bounce rate” and keep shoppers on your website for as long as possible.

And engaged session simply refers to a session that lasts 10 seconds or longer, or as resulted in the shopper visiting more than two pages.

This gives a good indication that shoppers are interested in that page, yet if the engaged sessions are down, and the bounce rate is up, then it might mean that the page needs improving, this could be something as simple as rewriting the product descriptions for example.

 

Organic Visitor Numbers

We would most definitely also recommend making sure that you keep track of how many organic visitors are visiting your website every single day, week, or month.

If there has been a sharp decrease in the number of organic visitors, then this could be an indication that an Google algorithm update has been rolled out, and your website has been penalised? or perhaps in the organic search engine optimization has been carried out, and white hat methods haven’t been followed?

You might therefore need to contact an SEO agency to make sure that this work is carried out correctly