How to Check Website Visitors in Google Analytics
Knowing who visits your website is the first step to understanding what's working and what isn't. Google Analytics 4 is a powerful, free tool that tells you exactly where your visitors come from, what they do on your site, and who they are. This tutorial will guide you through the essential reports in GA4 to find and understand your website visitor data.
First, Let's Clarify 'Visitor' Metrics
Before jumping into reports, it's helpful to know how Google Analytics defines and counts your audience. You'll see these terms constantly, and understanding the difference is crucial for accurate analysis.
Users: This metric represents the number of unique individuals who have visited your website. If someone visits your site on Monday and again on Friday from the same browser, GA4 counts them as one "User" for that period.
Sessions: This is a group of interactions a single user takes within a given timeframe. A session begins when a user arrives on your site and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. One user can have multiple sessions, for example, if they visit your site in the morning and then again in the evening.
Views: Previously known as "Pageviews," this is the total number of pages that were viewed on your site. If one user visits three different pages during their session, that would count as one user, one session, and three views.
Because of these definitions, your number of "Views" will always be highest, followed by "Sessions," and then "Users." Don't be alarmed that these numbers don't match - they aren't supposed to.
Finding Your Core Visitor Reports in GA4
The vastness of Google Analytics can feel intimidating, but you only need to focus on a few key areas to get a handle on your visitor data. Most of what you need is located in the left-hand navigation menu under the Reports tab.
When you click "Reports," you'll see a collection of reports organized by topic. We'll be focusing primarily on the reports within the "Acquisition," "Engagement," and "Demographics" sections.
The Big Picture: How Many Visitors Does My Website Get?
Let’s start with the most basic question: how many people are coming to your site?
The quickest way to answer this is with the Traffic acquisition report. This report is your command center for understanding visitor volume and an excellent starting point for any analysis.
Here’s how to get there:
Log in to your Google Analytics account.
In the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports.
Under the "Life cycle" section, find and click on Acquisition.
Finally, click on Traffic acquisition.
Here you'll see a line chart at the top and a table below it. The table shows your total number of Users and Sessions for the selected date range. To get a simple count of total visitors, look at the "Users" metric in the first row of the table. You can easily change the date at the top right of the screen to view data for today, yesterday, the last 7 days, the last 30 days, or a custom range.
Where Are My Website Visitors Coming From?
Now that you know how many visitors you have, the next critical question is, "Where did they find me?" The same Traffic acquisition report answers this perfectly. The table breaks down your visitor data by "Session default channel group," which is just a fancy way of saying how people arrived at your site.
Here's a breakdown of the most common channels you'll see:
Organic Search: Visitors who found your site through a search engine like Google or Bing without clicking on an ad. This reflects your SEO efforts.
Direct: Visitors who typed your URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark. These are often returning visitors or people who already know your brand.
Referral: Visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website.
Organic Social: Visitors who came from a non-paid post on a social media platform like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
Paid Search: Visitors who clicked on one of your paid ads from a search engine (e.g., Google Ads).
Email: Visitors who clicked a link from an email campaign you sent.
By scanning this list, you can quickly see which marketing channels are most effective. For instance, if you see that "Organic Social" is driving a lot of users, you know your social media strategy is paying off and might be worth investing more time in.
What Kind of Visitors Are Coming to My Site?
Understanding the demographics and technology of your visitors helps you build a better user experience and tailor your content more effectively. You can find this information in the "User" reports collection.
Audience Demographics
To see where your users are physically located, along with their age and gender, navigate to Reports → Demographics → Demographic details. Here you'll find tabs that break down your audience data by:
Country and City: Essential for businesses that depend on local traffic or are planning to expand to new regions.
Age and Gender: Helps you understand your primary audience persona. You can use this to ensure your branding, messaging, and content resonate with the people you’re trying to reach.
Note: To see age and gender data, you may need to enable "Google Signals" in your Admin settings. GA4 will prompt you if this isn't already turned on.
Technology Usage
Equally important is knowing what technology your audience uses to browse your site. Navigate to Reports → Tech → Tech details to see your visitors broken down by:
Device Category: Whether they are using a desktop, mobile, or tablet device. If you see that 80% of your visitors are on mobile, you know your website's mobile experience needs to be flawless.
Browser and Operating System: This is more for technical troubleshooting, helping designers and developers ensure your site works correctly for the vast majority of your audience.
What Are My Visitors Doing on My Site?
It's great to have visitors, but what are they actually doing once they arrive? The Pages and screens report shows you exactly which pages are the most popular and engaging.
Find it by going to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens. The table in this report shows a list of your website pages and provides key metrics for each:
Views: The total number of times each page was seen.
Users: The number of unique users who saw each page.
Average engagement time: This metric shows how long, on average, your web page was the main focus in a user's browser. A high engagement time is a great indicator that your content is valuable and holds the reader's attention.
Use this report to identify your high-performing content. Which blog posts get the most views? Do visitors spend a lot of time on your "Services" page? These insights tell you what your audience values, helping you decide what kind of content to create next.
A Quick Way to Create Custom Visitor Segments
The standard reports are excellent, but sometimes you need to answer more specific questions, like "How many of my visitors from Canada are using mobile devices?" GA4’s Comparisons feature lets you do this easily right within the standard reports.
While viewing any standard report (like the Traffic acquisition report), click "Add comparison" at the top of the page. You can then build a filter for a specific audience segment.
For example, you could create a segment where:
Dimension: Country
Match Type: exactly matches
Value: Canada
Apply this filter, and GA4 will show you the standard report data for just your users from Canada, side-by-side with your overall data. This is a simple but powerful way to start segmenting your visitors without needing to build complex custom reports.
Final Thoughts
Checking your website visitors in Google Analytics is a foundational skill for anyone looking to improve a website’s performance. By regularly checking your reports on traffic acquisition, user demographics, and on-site engagement, you can make smarter, data-driven decisions that grow your audience and your business.
Once you get comfortable analyzing data in Google Analytics, you’ll start wishing you could do the same for all your other platforms too — like your ad accounts, CRM, and e-commerce store. We built Graphed to solve this exact problem. By connecting all your marketing and sales data sources in one place, we let you ask questions in plain English like, "Show me a dashboard of a Facebook Ads new users versus my organic Google Analytics traffic" and instantly get the dashboard you need, no manual data wrangling required.