Master GA4: 7 Google Analytics Reports for SEO Insights

Google Analytics (GA4) is a useful, free web app for your SEO. It collects data from your site to create reports that give you information into how users find and interact with your website. 

But if you don’t know how to extract this data, using it for SEO would feel like solving a Rubik’s Cube puzzle. 

In this article, I’ll explain seven (7) relevant SEO reports you can generate from GA to improve your SEO. But before we get started, let’s capture the basics on how to track events: 

How to measure events on GA4 

In GA4, every action a user takes on your website is recorded as an event with its own unique timestamps and parameters. This includes page views, form submissions, downloads, and even scrolls. 

For instance, say you recently published a landing page for your new e-commerce product. With events, you can track: 

• Scroll depth – to measure how far users scroll down on your page. 
• Clicks on your CTA (Call to action) – to measure the total number of users that clicked on specific CTAs (that is, users with purchase intent). 

The bottom line is that event tracking gives you a clearer picture of what users do on your website, and this data helps you make informed decisions about new marketing approaches to increase revenue. 

There are four different types of events on GA4: 

• Automatically collected events: These are events tracked by default in GA4. They’re triggered by basic interactions on your website, such as page_view, session_start, screen_view, etc. 
• Recommended events: These are events Google suggests based on your business model, e.g., purchase, login, or sign_up. They’re not automated, so you need to manually activate them. 
• Custom events: These events require custom coding to be activated. You can use custom events to create and track metrics that are not captured by other event types but are important for your business goals. For example, phone_click, pdf_download, or share_social. 
• Enhanced measurement events: These events are tracked automatically, and you can enable/disable them in your GA4 settings. Examples are page_scrolls, outbound_clicks, and form_submit. 

To set up an event on GA4, follow these steps: 

• Log in to your GA4 account and click Admin → Events. 

• Mark an event as a Conversion using the toggle. 
• Or create a new custom event if it doesn’t already exist. 
• In the Event name, write the name “generate_lead” (or any other name that represents the event you want to track), and click the toggle next to Mark as a key event if necessary. 
• In Choose How to Create an Event, select Create Without Code.
• Under Identify an existing event to use as the trigger for the new event in Event name, select page_view.
• Under URL, enter the URL you want GA4 to pull these events from: https://www.example.com/contact-us-submitted. For example: 

• Click Create. 

Now… let’s get into the fun part:  

7 Google Analytics Reports and How to Use Them to Get More Information about Your SEO 

1. Organic traffic report 

The organic traffic report tracks the total number of users that visit your website through unpaid, non-advertising channels. Each click to your website is considered organic traffic, which is either through direct website visits (from the search engine) or when a user clicks on your link from the search results. 

GA4 lets you track organic traffic through the “Acquisition Report” under “Life Cycle.” The “Life Cycle” collection is where GA4 organizes reports that show the entire lifecycle of users on your website (from the discovery to the retention stage). It’s divided into four reports: 

• Acquisition report: This report shows how users arrive on your site and it’s where you’ll find the organic traffic report. 
• Engagement report: This shows user engagement on your website, including conversions.  
• Monetization report: This helps you to analyze the revenue generated from your high-value pages.  
• Retention Report: This feature enables you to analyze how your website retains users. 

The Acquisition Report is further split into two: 

• User acquisition report that shows how users find your website for the first time. 
• Traffic acquisition report that shows where your traffic comes from. 

Under the traffic acquisition report, GA4 allows you to track traffic via: 

• Channel groups, e.g, organic search or social: 

• Medium, e.g., organic search, referral, or email: 

• Source, e.g Google, Bing, or Instagram: 

If you notice more traffic from one channel over the other, double your efforts on the effective strategy and optimize the underperforming one. 

That is, if you notice more organic traffic from organic social, and less from search engines, increase your social media presence (to increase your wins) and re-optimize for more relevant keywords for search engines. 

• Also, if you want to get more insights on your organic traffic, link your Google Search Console (GSC) account to GA4. It shows you the exact keywords that people use to access your website: 

You’ll find this under “Search Console” in the admin page: 

2. Referral traffic and backlink report 

Referral traffic and backlink reports analyze users who come to your website from other sites (referral traffic) and the inbound links that point to your website (backlinks). This lets you know: 

• The quantify and quality of backlinks pointing to your website.
• The effectiveness of your link-building campaigns. 
• How authoritative other websites perceive your content to be. 
• The number of traffic from AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, or Bing AI. 

You’ll find the referral traffic and backlinks in the “Traffic Acquisition” report. 

• Simply go to “Acquisition >> Traffic Acquisition.”
• Change the session dimension from “Default Channel Group” to “Session Source/Medium.”  
• In the search bar, type “Referral” to filter the results 

The referral sources will be displayed on your screen, including the number of users from each source.  

Say you want to check the referral traffic from ChatGPT, simply enter “ChatGPT” into the search box, and the report will be generated in seconds: 

From this report, the total number of unique visitors from ChatGPT is 967, and 918 of these users spent more than 10 seconds on the website. 

If you’re also getting traffic from AI platforms, it’s good practice to examine the pages attracting the traffic to see which one attracts the visitors to your website. 

Check the content structure, topic, and heading format to understand why they perform well. You can replicate this pattern across other pages on your website to attract more traffic to your website. Especially if you want to drive traffic to other relevant, high-value pages. 

Another way you can track traffic from AI platforms is to create a custom code. You can read all about how to do this here. 

📌Read more: SEO vs GEO: Where should you focus your budget? 

3. Technical SEO report

Although you cannot generate a single technical SEO report on GA4, you can customize different metrics and dimensions to spot technical SEO issues that affect your SEO. 

Start by analyzing your high-value pages. Check those with no engagement, conversions, or traffic. To find this report, go to “Reports >>Engagement >> Pages and Screens” 

Under “Pages and Scenes,” you’ll see a report showing your most visited pages. Check out the pages with low “Average Engagement Rate” 

In this report, for example, the “/Google + Redesign/Stationery” page is way below the average engagement time. This is a good starting point for your technical SEO analysis. 

Next, check the pages with a high bounce rate. It tells you the percentage of people who land on your website and leave without engaging with your content. 

High bounce rate can be a result of several factors, such as: 

• Your web content didn’t meet user expectations. 
• Your page loads slowly. 
• Intrusive pop-ups. 
• Your website has a poor user interface and is not user-friendly.

To Google, a page has a high bounce rate as the percentage of sessions that: 

• Had fewer than 2 pages or screen views. 
• Had zero conversion events. 
• Were less than 20 seconds long. 

To find pages with high bounce rates, go to the left-hand menu and click “Reports >> Acquisition >> User Acquisition.” The bounce rate will be shown on your screen like this: 

From this report, you’ll see the average bounce rate across all pages is 45.98%. The pages “Benjamin School” and “Anchor Links” have a high bounce rate. So you’ll need to run a technical SEO audit to know the root cause. 

4. Channel report 

The Channel report compiles all your traffic sources and lets you understand which marketing channels drive traffic to your website. This report categorizes traffic under: 

• Organic Search. 
• Paid Search. 
• Direct. 
• Referral. 
• Social. 
• Email. 

To check this report, go to “Report >> Acquisition >> Traffic Acquisition”

Right on the dashboard, scroll down to see your channels: 

In this report, organic search generates the highest traffic (8,758), while email has the least (7). 

5. Landing page report 

A landing page is any page on your website where users land after clicking on a link in the search results, paid social ad, or social media. 

These pages can either be your home page, a product page, a blog post, or any other page. They’re mainly used to generate leads or increase website organic conversion rates. 

GA4 lets you track the effectiveness of your landing page. You’ll be able to compare metrics such as: 

• Conversions, 
• New users, 
• Views, 
• Total revenue, and 
• Average engagement time per session. 

To find this report, go to the “Reports” tab in the left-hand navigation panel. Then click “Engagement >> Landing Page” 

6. Organic conversion report 

An organic conversion report analyzes data based on how visitors from unpaid or organic sources perform desired actions, such as making a purchase, paying for a subscription, or filling out a form. This report is (very) important because it helps you understand if your SEO strategies are profitable or not. 

Your conversion report differs across the different stages of the sales funnel. 

For instance, in the awareness stage where you’re trying to increase your brand visibility, your conversion focus might be organic traffic and impressions. At the bottom of the funnel, your primary goal would be to convert this traffic into paying, loyal customers. 

The first step is to create “Conversion Events.” These are your goals (called “Events” in GA4) and follow the steps I outlined in the first section of this page. 

Next, go to “Conversions” under “Events” in the Property Column and click “New Conversion Event” 

You’ll see a page to enter your event name. Ensure that the event name matches the one you created in step one: 

In the next page, toggle on the “Mark as conversion” setting if it’s not turned on by default: 

And viola! Your conversion event will start tracking. You can repeat this process for all the conversions you want to measure. 

Once that’s completed, check all your conversion tracking in “Life cycle >> Engagement >> Conversions.” 

If you scroll down this page, you’ll see the channels driving conversions on your website:  

In the report above, referral channels drive the highest conversions, followed by organic search. In this case, you’ll want to invest more effort and resources in referral channels, and re-optimize your SEO strategy for conversions. 

7. Search console query report

If you’ve linked your GSC to your GA account, it makes sense to check the performance report. And if you haven’t, do so now, because you can get a more comprehensive information on your website’s performance when you combine these two. You’ll learn: 

• How users find you (your organic search data). 
• How users behave on your website (user experience). 
• What they do once they land on your website (user behavior).  

With this data, you’ll understand your user journey from the search discovery to conversion, and make informed decisions on subsequent SEO campaigns. 

To view your GSC report, go to the Admin section on GA: 

• Under the “Property” column, click “Product Links’. 
• In the “Property” column, find and click any of the platforms you wish to add. 

• Then, click “Link” to add the platform.

This edit might take up to 48 hours to reflect the data. Once it does, you’d see the platform listed on your GA dashboard: 

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see the main keywords your web visitors used to find you online: 

In the report above, the keyword “Google hoodie” has a higher organic search click-through rate compared to others. These keywords are a good starting point for your SEO keyword strategy. 

Conclusion 

Setting up a GA4 account can get overwhelming. But you don’t have to figure everything out from the outset. Start with the major metrics that matter for your business, such as organic traffic and conversions, for instance, and target more as your business grows.