How should I use Google Analytics for my business?

You have set up GA4, it is collecting data and showing you lovely charts and graphs and tables, all filled with data from your website. So now what? There are a lot of reports built into GA4, some are more useful than others, some are more relevant than others, depending on your business model. When I start any analytics work, these are the questions I ask myself

5 Questions to ask your Google Analytics

1. What do I want to know?

   This is a tricky one, but it has to come first because it will shape everything you choose to do and look at when using Google Analytics. Brainstorming questions about your site can be a really helpful exercise to work out what it is you want to get from Analytics. You can take a very broad and generic question like “What pages are doing well” and break that into questions that can have data backed answers. You might break that initial question into
   Which page is looked at the most?
   Which page do people land on the most?
   Which page do people leave from the most?
   Which page do people spend the most time on?

   These are now questions that Google Analytics is equipped to answer with data. Unfortunately, it is then up to you to decide if the data matches your idea of “doing well”

2. Do I trust this data?

   A healthy dose of scepticism should be at the heart of any project. Google Analytics can show you a lot of things, but it doesn’t discriminate between good and bad data. If the input is bad, the output will be bad also. Fortunately GA4 comes with tools that let you test the data that it displays. The Debug View is a great tool to interrogate how actions on your site turn into data in Google Analytics.

3. Does it look right?

   You know your business best. Don’t take anyone else’s advice unless you trust them. The same goes for web analytics, if the data doesn’t look right, or doesn’t feel right then chances are that something has gone wrong in the setup. Maybe it looks like a lot of traffic is coming in the small hours of the night - it might be worth checking the timezone setting for your GA4 property before changing anything else.

4. What is the data telling me?

   This is where getting to know your data is a real advantage. It sometimes helps just to “say what you see”. If you spot that an obscure page is somehow a landing page for a lot of traffic, that tells you the content on that page is worth something to potential users. Or if you are getting newsletter sign ups, what is the ratio of sign ups to overall page views - it might be that the data is telling you a page has a very high or very low chance of persuading a user to sign up.

5. What should I do about it?

   You’ve set out your questions, you’ve double checked the validity of the data, you feel what is shown on the screen is a fair reflection of what you think is going on, and you’ve found some useful information - now it is time to decide how to use that information. If you feel you’re not getting enough traffic through from Google search results, then working a plan to optimise existing content would be a good start, or planning out new content that matches good user intent for your business. Or if a signup page isn’t getting the signups you’d hope, then look to change how the page is laid out, or the language around the call to action.

These questions form the basis for most analytic investigations. The goal is always to come away with something that can be acted on. Whether it is thinking of new pages, or changing existing pages to make things easier for users. This is how analytics pays for itself by giving you the data so you can make positive changes to your business.