Essential GA4 Metrics for a High-Level Website Performance Audit
For most people, checking website analytics is not at the top of the monthly checklist. Many of us stare blankly at the GA4 dashboard and don’t know where to start.
We’ve put together six informative data points that will give you a peek into your website’s performance. The data points are in two categories: Traffic Sources and User Behavior.
Traffic Sources: Where Do Your Site Visitors Come From?
These three data points will share the key sources of your website’s traffic. From marketing platforms to mobile devices, you can understand how prospects are arriving at your website.
Session Source: Identifying the Origin of Your Website Traffic
The Session Source data shares the specific origin of your website traffic, such as a search engine (Google), a social network (Instagram), or a direct URL click. It tells you exactly where your visitors were right before they landed on your site.
Why is Session Source important?
Session Source gives you insights on where to focus your marketing efforts. If you see most of your customers coming from organic social media but almost none from paid Google ads, you know exactly where to double down and where to cut budget.
Session Campaign: Measuring Marketing ROI
Session Campaign reports on specific marketing campaigns. This allows you to track the effectiveness of specific initiatives, like “PackExpo_Preshow” or “HubSpot_EngineerSequence.” These performance details will come from paid campaigns from Google Ads or social media platforms.
What does Session Campaign tell me?
Session Campaign is the report card for your paid marketing efforts. When paid campaigns are created correctly, you will see the conversions and behaviors of prospects as they engage with your website.
PRO TIP: When working with digital marketing platforms or other paid advertising, be sure to use UTM Codes. The custom links specifically assign a trackable campaign name to measure performance.
Mobile vs. Desktop: Comparing Device User Experience
Measuring website traffic from desktop (or laptop), tablets, or mobile devices is done through the Device Category display. This simple data point shares what number (and percentage) of website visitors visit from these devices.
Why does mobile vs. desktop traffic matter?
The data helps you understand if your website experience needs to be better optimized for smaller screens. This identifies technical friction. If your conversion rate is high on desktop but nonexistent on mobile, your website is likely difficult to use on a phone.
User Behavior: How Visitors Interact with Your Content
Once we understand where the traffic comes from, knowing how your site visitors behave is crucial.
Active Users: Measuring Quality Traffic
Active Users are the number of unique visitors who had an “engaged session” or visited your site for the first time within a specific timeframe. It measures your business’s pulse. While total visits are nice, Active Users tell you if you’ve got real human visitors that find value in your site, not just attracting bots or accidental clicks.
What’s the difference between an Engaged Session and an Active User?
You see “Engaged Sessions” with Traffic Sources and “Active Users” with User Behaviors. But one depends on the other.
Engaged Sessions are website visits that have meaningful interaction. They specifically meet one of these criteria:
- Session lasts 10 seconds or longer
- Includes at least one conversion event
- Visits two or more pages
An Active User is an individual who has one or more Engaged Sessions in a specific timeframe. For example, someone visits your site for over a minute each day over the last five days. It will count as five Engaged Sessions, but only one Active User for the week.
Engaged Sessions measure visit quality. Active Users measure the number of quality visits.
Engagement Time: Determining the Value of Your Website Content
Engagement Time is the average time your website was at the forefront of a user’s screen. This is an improvement over the older “time on page,” measurement since it specifically tracks when the user is actively interacting with your content.
Why is Engagement Time important?
Engagement Time is the ultimate BS detector for your website content. If a site visitor spends two minutes on a blog post, they’re reading it; if they spend 3 seconds, your headline was good but your content didn’t deliver what they wanted.
Pages and Screens: Evaluating Your Top Performing Content
Pages and Screens is a report that shows which specific web pages site users are visiting. It helps you identify your most popular content and where users might be losing interest. Data displayed will show you the number of actual page views, the number of active users, and the average amount of engaged time spent on the page.
Pages and Screens vs Landing Page Report
“Pages and Screens” report on all visited pages a site visitor experiences on the website. “Landing Pages” provide traffic details on the very first page site visitors arrive on.
Landing Pages is a great report for understanding the major entry points to your website. Reviewing it in conjunction with an organic Google search report from Search Console provides incredible insights.
But when you’re interested in how all of the website pages are performing, Pages and Screens is the best report.
Is There an Easier Way to Track My Website Performance?
Google Analytics can be intimidating. Now start pulling data from LinkedIn, Google Ads, and the advertorial you ran with a trade publication. The monthly report to leadership is now taking a full day to put together.
But what if you had it all in one click?
Signalfire’s data dashboard delivers.
A single click that gives you access to performance data from all your marketing channels. Share the link with leadership, download a PDF, or even print it out.
Stop losing hours of critical time to spreadsheets and blocks of numbers no one understands. Get your customized data dashboard now!