Web analytics, and specifically Google Analytics (or GA4), is simply a tool that tells you more about your website’s traffic: where it’s coming from and how it behaves once it gets there.
Busy CEOs, company founders and executives like you know that Web analytics is a whole world unto itself. With countless ways to slice and dice your analytics data, who has time to learn it all?
The good news is: you don’t have to. By becoming familiar with how to read a small handful of key metrics that show up in over 95% of typical Google Analytics 4 reports, you’ll be positioned to understand the most important take-aways from any report that graces your mahogany desk (or your beach chair).
A Quick Guide to GA4 for Busy Executives
I’ve prepared for you a quick and handy guide on how to make sense of the most important handful of metrics typically found in GA4 reports. Knowing what each of these key terms means for your business will give you a leg up in translating these reports to effective decision-making. This knowledge will allow you to focus on the core concepts that matter day to day.
Dimensions and Metrics
Let’s start with a quick overview of how Google Analytics 4 sees the world. GA4 organizes reporting data in terms of two major concepts: Dimensions and Metrics. (There is a third category, Segments, but this is actually just another type of dimension. We’ll skip that for now).
Think of dimensions as how you want your data broken out and organized. And think of metrics as the actual numbers (usually an integer, decimal or a percentage) that give us the quantity, frequency or proportion of some aspect of our website activity that we care about.
There are currently a whopping 341 dimensions available in GA4. Some of my most common go-to dimensions are these three:
Landing page + query string: The first page that somebody visited when they came to your website for the given visit
Session source / medium: The way that the traffic was driven to your site, such as from a digital ad, organic search, direct visit, etc.
Page path + query string: A page visited
Leveraging these three dimensions will get you very far in your analytics journey in terms of understanding your website traffic activity.
The Four Most Useful GA4 Metrics
GA4 offers fully 169 metrics to choose from! The top 2% of metrics in term of usefulness, in my experience: Sessions, Events, Engaged Sessions, and Users.
Sessions
GA4 simples counts “1 session” whenever somebody comes to your website and then leaves again – whether they visited one page for 2 seconds or 10 pages for 2 hours. It is still counted as 1 session. If the same person returns to your website later, that would be counted as a separate session. Meaning: if Bob visits your website three times in the reporting time period, that would count as “3 sessions” in GA4.
Events
Events are user-defined “important actions” on the website. Events are limited only by your imagination. Some examples of Events you could choose to set up include:
- A certain link click on a certain page
- A scroll down more than 75% of the page
- A thank you page loads after a web form submission
Engaged Sessions
An Engaged Session is the same as Session, but it ads another condition: they have to have been viewed by GA4 as an Engaged visitor. An Engaged Session is one whereby any of these things is true:
The session lasted at least 10 seconds
AND/OR
The visitor visited more than one page during the session
AND/OR
The session triggered an Event
Think of Engaged Sessions as those that are most valuable type of Sessions for your website, your brand, and your business.
Users
Users is just what is sounds like: the number of humans (and possibly a few bots) that have visited your website. User data is “unique,” meaning: a User who visits three times will be counted as “1 user.” Users can further be broken out by sub-categories: Active Users, New User, Returning Users and Total Users.
Now that you are armed with this information, you are positioned to glean a lot more actionable information out of your GA4 reports. Look for one or more of these metrics in the next report you review. They should be easy to spot. Later, you can always ask your BI or analytics team to dive even deeper into GA4. But these four metrics are a great place to learn where to dive in deeper.
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JLytics‘ mission is to empower CEOs, founders and business executives to leverage the power of data in their everyday lives so that they can focus on what they do best: lead.
