How to Check Website Traffic on Google Analytics

Checking your website traffic shouldn't feel like deciphering a secret code. You just want to know how many people are visiting your site, where they're coming from, and what they're doing once they arrive. This guide will walk you through exactly how to find those answers in Google Analytics 4, showing you the key reports and insights you need to understand your performance.

First, A Quick Word on Google Analytics 4

If you've used Google Analytics in the past, you might notice the new version, GA4, looks quite different. The previous version, Universal Analytics (UA), was built around "sessions" and "pageviews." GA4 has a more flexible, event-based model, meaning it tracks specific user interactions - like a click, a scroll, or a form submission - as individual "events."

This may seem like a small change, but it provides a much deeper understanding of the entire user journey, not just isolated sessions. While the interface has a learning curve, the core job of checking website traffic is straightforward once you know where to look. We'll focus on the essential reports every marketer and business owner needs.

The Absolute Quickest Way: Your GA4 Home Page

Sometimes, you just need a quick, high-level overview. For that, the GA4 Home page is your best friend. The moment you log in, you're presented with a dashboard of summary "cards" that give you a snapshot of your site's performance.

Look for these cards at the top:

• Users: This shows the total number of unique individuals who visited your site during the selected period. If one person visits your site five times, they're counted as one user.
• Sessions: This is the total number of visits to your site. Using the example above, that one person who visited five times generated five sessions.
• New Users: The number of people who visited your site for the very first time.
• Views: In GA4, "views" essentially replaced "pageviews." This card shows the total number of app screens or web pages your users saw.

By default, this data is for the last 28 days, but you can change the date range in the top right corner. The Home page is perfect for a daily 30-second health check on your website's activity.

Diving Deeper: Exploring the 'Reports' Section

When you're ready to move beyond the quick snapshot, the Reports section (found in the left-hand navigation menu with a chart icon) is where the real analysis happens. Clicking on it takes you to the "Reports snapshot," which is essentially a more detailed version of the Home page dashboard. Here you’ll find cards summarizing acquisition (how you get users), engagement (what users do), and more.

This is your starting point for answering three crucial questions:

1. Where is my traffic coming from?
2. Which pages are the most popular?
3. Who are my visitors?

Let's look at the specific reports that answer each of these questions.

1. Where is your traffic coming from? (The Traffic Acquisition Report)

This is arguably the most important report for understanding your marketing performance. It tells you which channels are driving people to your website. Here's how to find and use it:

How to find it: In the left-hand navigation, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

What it tells you: This report breaks down your traffic by marketing channel. By default, you'll see a table organized by the "Session default channel group." These are GA4's predefined categories for your traffic sources:

• Organic Search: Visitors who arrived after clicking a non-paid link from a search engine like Google or Bing. This is your SEO traffic.
• Direct: Visitors who typed your URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark.
• Paid Search: Visitors from paid ads on search engines (e.g., Google Ads).
• Organic Social: Visitors from non-paid links on social media platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), or LinkedIn.
• Referral: Visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website (e.g., a blog or news article that mentioned you).
• Email: Visitors who clicked a link from an email campaign.

For each channel, you can analyze key metrics like:

• Users and Sessions: The total number of unique visitors and visits from that channel.
• Engaged sessions: The number of visits that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews. This metric helps filter out users who "bounced" immediately.
• Engagement rate: The percentage of sessions that were "engaged." This is a better metric than the old "bounce rate" for understanding how valuable the traffic from a channel is.
• Conversions: If you have conversion events set up (like a form submission or a purchase), this column tells you which channels are driving the most valuable actions.

Practical Tip You can change the primary dimension of the report to get more detailed information. Click the small down-arrow on “Session default channel group” and select a different option, like Session source / medium. This will give you a more granular view, showing you not just "Organic Search" but the specific source, like "google / organic" or "bing / organic."

2. Which pages are your most popular? (The Pages and Screens Report)

Knowing how people find your site is half the battle, the other half is understanding what they do once they arrive. The "Pages and screens" report shows you which pieces of content are getting the most attention.

How to find it: Navigate to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens.

What it tells you: This report lists all the pages on your website and ranks them by popularity. The key metric here is Views, which shows the total number of times each page was viewed. You can sort the report by views to instantly see your top-performing blog posts, landing pages, or product pages.

Other useful metrics include:

• Users: The number of unique people who viewed a particular page.
• Average engagement time: This shows how long, on average, your site was the main focus in a user's browser for each page. Longer engagement time often suggests the content is compelling and valuable.

Practical Tip Use the search bar above the table to filter for specific pages. For instance, if you want to see the performance of all your blog posts, you could type "/blog/" into the search bar. This helps you analyze specific content categories on your site.

3. Who are your visitors? (Demographics and Tech Reports)

Understanding your audience - where they're from, their age ranges, and the technology they use - can inform your entire marketing and content strategy. GA4 splits this into a few useful reports.

How to find it:

• For location, age, and gender: Navigate to Reports > User > User attributes > Demographics details.
• For device type: Navigate to Reports > Tech > Tech details.

What it tells you: The Demographics details report allows you to view your traffic broken down by Country, City, Gender, and Age. You might discover that a significant portion of your audience comes from a country you never expected, opening up a new market to target.

The Tech details report shows what technologies your visitors are using. You can view your traffic by Browser, Device category (Desktop, Mobile, or Tablet), or Operating system. For most sites, it is crucial to pay close attention to the "Device category" breakdown. If a majority of your visitors are on mobile, your site must be fast and perfectly optimized for small screens.

4. Using Comparisons for Deeper Insights

Once you've got the basics, you can unlock deeper insights by comparing data sets against each other. With GA4's "Add Comparison" feature, you can easily view answers to questions like:

• Has traffic from Organic Search gone up or down this month?
• Do mobile users have a different pattern compared to desktop users?

A simple example is comparing time periods:

1. In any report, click Add comparison at the top of the page.
2. In the pop-up, the automatic "Dimension" will be Date. Select the previous periods (the same length as your current range) from the drop-down.
3. Click Apply. You'll now see two rows of data side by side for a quick comparison, as well as a "percent change" column.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool once you know where to start. By focusing on the core reports like Traffic Acquisition and Pages and Screens, you can stop spending time wondering and get clear insights on your audience and content.

While GA4 is fantastic for understanding your website's traffic, it's just one piece of the puzzle. As we're trying to lay out your marketing, sales, and web data together from platforms like Google Ads, Shopify, or Salesforce, the analytics will bring everything into one seamless place so you can get back to actually growing your business. To see how, try Graphed and explore precisely for this reason, where you can efficiently optimize and address questions about your entire data stack. We do the hard work of pulling everything together so you can grow your business efficiently.