If you’re running ads, or looking to track your website’s traffic and conversions in any meaningful way in 2025 & 2026, you’re probably using Google Analytics 4.
Here, we’ll take you through a basic overview of what data to look for & how to get the most out of Google’s most up to date analytics system.
Make Sure Your Tracking Is Set Up Correctly
The first and most important priority when using Google Analytics is to ensure that your tracking is set up correctly! When you first set up your Google Analytics account, you will need to go to Settings > Admin to create your Property. During this process, ensure all settings such as currency, time zones and location are all accurate, and then you will be given a code to install on the website, usually in the <head> tag. You can also set up tracking for the website using Google Tag Manager, which can be more comprehensive in terms of the types of actions you will be able to track, especially when it comes to more specific APIs. You will need to remember to link this to your analytics account. Regardless of how you set up your tracking, it is important to ensure that your setup is fully installed, operational and working correctly. You can test this using Google Tag Assistant.
Track Your Key Events
It’s not much use implementing tracking code on your website unless you’re tracking “key events”. Key events, in laymans terms, are your conversion actions – actions people take on your site once they have consumed the information required and are ready to buy your products or enlist your services. These can be anything from direct conversions such as ecommerce purchases and file downloads to more lead focused conversion actions like click-to-call links and contact forms. There are many ways to implement this conversion tracking via either analytics or tag manager. Typically, we tend to use triggering capabilities in Tag Manager to track CTA links such as click-to-call & click-to-email buttons, whereas we will use analytics directly to track contact form submissions and purchases.
Traffic Acquisition
So, you’ve set up your tracking code, key events, and you’ve tested to see if this is all working. Great! So what can we learn now?
There is a large array of different reports available to view on Google Analytics once your tracking has been fully set up and enough data has been brought through from the site. Our personal favourite, and the one we find ourselves using the most, is Traffic Acquisition. You can find this report on the sidebar at the left hand side of the screen, under the section “Acquisition” (see the image below):
The traffic acquisition report shows you shows how users find your site (via channels, sources, and mediums) helping you understand which marketing efforts drive the most visits and engagement. Within this report, you can view the amount of sessions (individual website views), engaged sessions, engagement rate, number of events, events per session, key events (conversions), key event rate, and revenue from ecommerce purchases over any given time period, broken down by the methods people used to find the website. From this, we can track whether the traffic has come from organic search results, paid search, direct traffic, social media, video searches, referral traffic and much more. You can even alter the parameters so that you can break this down by individual ads campaign, or which social or search platform was used. This is incredibly useful for determining exactly where website traffic has come from, and how successful each method of acquisition has been, allowing you to understand your customer’s viewing and conversion processes and make changes to better optimise your site for more success! GA4 also plots this data onto an easy-to-understand graph for you to get a clearer picture.
Engagement & Monetisation Reports
Once you’ve been able to parse exactly where your website data is coming from, we can dive deeper into that data and see what it says about your website. The Engagement set of reports can be incredibly useful for this, giving you not just a general overview of site engagement, but also more specific breakdowns such as the landing pages that have seen the most success, as well as the areas of your site most likely to engage viewers and lead to repeat engagements & further conversions. You can also tell which pages your customers have been converting from, which is invaluable if you are operating a larger site with CTAs, contact forms and purchase options on multiple pages.
When reporting on ecommerce sites, we can also use the Monetisation section of reports to not just learnwhich specific products have been purchased, but also a breakdown of total revenue, number of purchases & conversion rates as well as data regarding users’ purchase & checkout journeys, which can be incredibly useful to use to streamline and optimise your shop to achieve more conversions. We can also see data related to specific promotions and offers that have been set up.
User Attributes
Here, we can view specific details about the users who have accessed your website and/or converted! Some of the useful data that you can gather from this section of reports includes:
- Country of origin
- City of origin
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
- Language
This is a fantastic tool for working out exactly who is using your site and how you can better optimise your website to attract the correct type of customer who is right for your business and convert. For example, if you are a business who operates solely in the UK yet most of your traffic is coming from the US, you might want to look into localised SEO strategies, as well as narrowing your ads audience targeting.
There is a whole world you can learn about your website through GA4 and Tag Manager. However, if you need help understanding this data, or working out how to use this to make meaningful and successful changes to your website and your marketing strategy, we’re here to help! Every Trick Marketing is hugely experienced in working with Google Analytics 4 and Tag Manager, and we can assist you with turning raw data into real, actionable strategies that will truly make a difference.
So book a consultaion today, you won’t regret it!