The Gist
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Event-based tracking. Event-based tracking with Google Analytics 4 reveals user behavior across websites and apps, providing better insights into customer journeys.
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Conversion and engagement. Key Google Analytics metrics like organic conversion rate and engagement time help marketers align digital traffic with business objectives.
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Mobile and SEO insights. Tracking mobile traffic percentage and average page load time helps marketers optimize for mobile-first audiences and improve SEO rankings.
While analytics has been part of the marketing landscape for over a decade, the shift to Google Analytics 4’s (GA4) event-based tracking has changed how we understand customer behavior.
These metrics aren’t just numbers; they form the fundamental narrative of your customer journey and tell how users interact with your digital presence across websites and apps. For businesses striving to create exceptional customer experiences, understanding and tracking the right GA4 metrics has become more crucial than ever.
This guide explores the 10 most impactful Google Analytics metrics that will shape your customer experience strategy this year, and it will help you transform raw data into actionable insights that drive business growth.
Table of Contents
Understanding Google Analytics Metrics and Their Evolution
GA4 metrics represent the events triggered whenever someone comes to a website page or app page that contains a GA4 analytic tag. GA4 metrics serve to help businesses understand user behavior across a tagged website or app. They were developed because analytics historically measured “hits,” the occurrence when a page was loaded into a browser. The activity was measured in a way that was not intuitive to the website or app layout.
For example, a hit could be attributed to an image loaded when its associated page is loaded. However, the activity may not be an element of interest to a website visitor.
The arrival of web analytics based on metrics introduced analytical efficiency. Metrics capture customer activity on a website or app in a more unified way, and they save marketers time mapping page elements to needed metrics.
Fast forward to today’s Google Analytics GA4. To better align with new developments in the underlying structure of websites and applications, GA4 bases its metric calculations on events.
Key GA4 Metrics for Marketing Success
These types of Google Analytics metrics are essential to paint an accurate picture of customer experiences online.
Organic Search Traffic
The volume of visits attributed through search engines is a proxy of the visitors coming to your site or app. The search volume indicates a measure of a website page’s SEO effectiveness and its visibility in search results. This metric should be tracked over time to identify trends and the impact of SEO efforts. Inspecting the search volume by keyword phrases can indicate what products, services or customer intention activity your website is consistently drawing online.
Organic Conversion Rate
The percentage of organic search visitors who complete desired actions (i.e., purchases, sign-ups, downloads). This metric helps evaluate how well your organic traffic aligns with your business goals and whether you’re attracting the right audience. When monitoring SEO through Google Analytics, organic search traffic is often paired with organic conversion rate to form a core analysis of how effectively internet traffic turns into desired actions.
Time on Page
The average duration visitors spend consuming your content. Higher session time on a given page typically indicates engaging, valuable content that satisfies user intent and can positively influence search rankings.
Pages per Session
The average number of pages users view during a visit. Higher numbers often indicate strong internal linking, engaging content and effective site navigation that keeps users exploring.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate might indicate content mismatch with search intent or poor user experience, though this varies by industry and page purpose. A high bounce rate on a page could also be a signal for poor page performance.
New vs. Returning Visitors
The ratio between first-time and repeat visitors. This metric helps gauge your content’s ability to both attract new audiences and build a loyal following through valuable, consistent content.
Landing Page Performance
Analysis of which pages attract organic traffic and how well they engage visitors. This helps identify your strongest content and opportunities for optimization.
Exit Page Analysis
Tracking which pages users most commonly leave from helps identify potential content or user experience issues that need addressing.
Average Page Load Time
Site speed metrics that directly impact both SEO rankings and user experience. Slower load times can increase bounce rates and negatively affect search rankings.
Mobile Traffic Percentage
The proportion of visitors accessing your site via mobile devices. With Google’s mobile-first indexing, understanding and optimizing the mobile experience is crucial for attracting customers who discover websites and apps through their smartphone or other mobile device.
Looking at page performance metrics helps identify which pages effectively attract organic search traffic. This connects with exit page data to show where users most commonly leave your site or app, and it highlights potential areas for improving customer experience.
Many of these metrics work together to give you a comprehensive view of your website or app performance relative to marketing objectives. They can also highlight areas of a website or app that need attention.
Related Article: Your User Experience Strategy Needs an Overhaul: Here’s How
How to Track and Monitor Google Analytics Metrics Effectively
When you decide which metrics you want to monitor, track those metrics within your dashboards. The selection should complement what information your stakeholders need to make decisions related to website or app activity. They should also reflect logical assumptions on the customer journey. A customer journey usually starts with a digital platform online. Customers discover a website through organic search or download an app because of a digital ad campaign. The metrics should help confirm what customers view when they arrive on a website or app page.
Analytics solutions have features to set up dashboards to cover the metrics you want. For example, a few tracking goal completions from organic search link your SEO efforts directly to business objectives, and it shows how well your organic traffic contributes to conversions.
GA4 metrics are not necessarily KPIs, but you can highlight them in your own reporting if the specific metrics align with given objectives. Whether a metric qualifies as a KPI depends on the specific business objectives. Here are examples of metrics used as KPIs:
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An ecommerce site might use purchase event metrics as KPIs. This means conversion rates on key pages are KPIs.
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A content site might focus on engagement time and return visitor metrics as KPIs, proving that visitors are engaging with the content material on a page.
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A lead generation business prioritizes form submission events. This means engagement metrics and subsequent conversions (i.e., clicking the submission button) describe how well people become leads for business.
To stay relevant, marketers should be in constant communication about what metrics support the KPIs that a team must monitor on behalf of a business.
The new year always introduces new challenges to decisions supporting a KPI. The race to adopt AI in search in 2025, for example, promises to upend how sites and apps are discovered online. The new search feature in ChatGPT will alter SEO through its citation panels and natural language results, offering marketers a new perspective on keyword research and content visibility in search results.
Related Article: Will ChatGPT Search Change Everything in SEO?
Integrating GA4 Data with Looker and BigQuery for Deeper Insights
Google Analytics was launched when most analytics tasks were regulated to its dashboards. Over the years, APIs played a factor in adding additional options to calculate metrics and add further visualizations. Users could call data from applications through an API to blend into metric calculations, data visualizations and dashboards.
Two platform options, Google Looker Studio and Google BigQuery, can ingest GA4 data as well as data from other sources. They are specifically designed for more elaborate business operations, such as SQL queries. The blending of data allows marketers to run more complex analyses, create custom reports and uncover potentially actionable insights.
Core Questions Around Google Analytics Metrics
Editor’s note: Here are two important questions to ask around Google Analytics metrics.
How does each Google Analytics 4 metric map to a given website and/or app activity?
Google Analytics, like all analytics tools, provides a wealth of metrics to be managed in a dashboard. But you should make sure that the metrics relate to customer activity in a website or app, as well as their respective staples in the customer journey.
How do the selected Google Analytics 4 metrics support activities related to my strategy?
Selecting what metrics to cover sets the direction of a team’s focus for an online presence. A whole dashboard might be dedicated only to metrics that are considered KPIs, while another will have metrics that benefit a specific team. Always confer with stakeholders, then plan the right follow-up to make sure the metrics stay relevant.
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