How to See Cities in Google Analytics

Knowing where your website visitors come from can tell you what you’re doing right and where you need to focus your marketing efforts. Finding city-level data in Google Analytics 4 is an easy way to get these insights, whether you’re fine-tuning an ad campaign or refining your local SEO strategy. This article will show you exactly how to find the city report in GA4, customize it with more dimensions, and use that information to make smarter decisions.

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Finding Your Website Traffic by City in GA4

Google Analytics 4 places location data inside the Demographics reports section. Getting there only takes a few clicks.

Here’s the step-by-step process:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics 4 property.
2. From the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports.
3. In the Reports menu, look for the "User" section and click on Demographics > Demographic details.

By default, GA4 will most likely show you data by Country. To switch this to a city-level view:

1. Look for the dropdown menu at the top-left of the chart, just above the table. It will probably say "Country".
2. Click this dropdown and select City from the list.

That's it! The report will now update to show a list of all the cities where your visitors are located, ranked by the number of users.

Understanding the Metrics in the City Report

Once you have the report on your screen, you'll see several columns of data. Here’s a quick breakdown of what these default metrics mean and how you can interpret them:

• Users: This is the total number of unique individuals who visited your site from a specific city. A high number of users from a city like Chicago means you have a strong audience there.
• Sessions: A session is a period of time a user is actively engaged with your website. One user can have multiple sessions. This metric helps you understand the overall volume of traffic from each city.
• Engaged sessions: GA4 counts a session as "engaged" if the visitor stays on the site for more than 10 seconds, has at least two pageviews, or completes a conversion event. This is a better measure of traffic quality than just looking at total sessions.
• Engagement rate: This is the percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions. A high engagement rate (e.g., 75% for Los Angeles) suggests visitors from that city find your content relevant and interesting. A low rate may signal that your marketing message isn't landing or you're reaching the wrong audience there.
• Event count: This shows the total number of events (like clicks, scrolls, or form submissions) triggered by users from that city. By default, it includes everything. To make this metric more useful, you can use the dropdown to select a specific conversion event, like purchase or generate_lead.
• Conversions: You can select any of your configured conversion events from the dropdown menu to see exactly how many times visitors from each city completed a desired action, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.

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Customizing Your Report for Sharper Insights

The standard City report is a great start, but its true power comes from customization. By adding secondary dimensions and filters, you can answer more specific questions about your audience.

Add a Secondary Dimension

A secondary dimension adds another column of data to your report, breaking down your primary dimension (City) into smaller groups. Click the blue + icon next to the 'City' dropdown to add one.

Here are a few powerful secondary dimensions to try:

• Session source / medium: Add this to see exactly how users from your top cities are finding you. You might find that New York traffic comes mostly from google / organic (suggesting strong SEO performance there), while Houston traffic comes from facebook / cpc (related to your paid social campaigns). This helps you assign credit to the right marketing channels for each region.
• Device category: This shows you whether users in a particular city are browsing on desktop, mobile, or tablet. If you see that your Phoenix audience is almost entirely on mobile, you can tailor your user experience and ad creatives to better suit smaller screens for that demographic.
• Landing page + query string: This reveals the first page visitors from a city saw when they arrived on your site. If users from Denver are frequently landing on a specific product page, it tells you that product is popular in that area, and you could create Denver-specific offers around it.

Filter Your Data

Filters narrow down the data in your report to show you a more specific slice of your audience. Click the Add filter button at the top of the report to create one.

Here are a few useful filter ideas:

• Filter by country: If your audience is largely from the United States, but you get some international traffic, you can filter to only include data where 'Country' exactly matches 'United States'. This removes the noise and gives you a clean view of your domestic audience.
• Filter by campaign: Want to see which cities responded best to your recent "Summer Sale" campaign? Add a filter where 'Session campaign' exactly matches 'Summer Sale' to see which geographical areas drove the most traffic and conversions for that specific effort.
• Filter for a specific traffic source: You can isolate traffic from a single source, like your email newsletter, by adding a filter where 'Session source / medium' contains 'email'. This will show you which cities have the most engaged email subscribers.

How to Use GA4 City Data to Grow Your Business

Gathering data is only half the battle. The next step is to put these geographic insights into action. Here are some practical ways to use city data from your GA4 reports.

1. Strengthen Your Local SEO and Content

Look for cities with high traffic but a low engagement rate or low conversions. This could be an opportunity to create content that serves those local audiences better. For example, if you see high traffic from Austin for your moving company website but few form fills, you could write a blog post like "The Ultimate Guide to Moving to Austin" that addresses local concerns, neighborhoods, and moving tips. This tailored content can increase engagement and drive more qualified leads.

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2. Hyper-Target Your Paid Advertising

Your City report is a goldmine for optimizing your Google Ads and Facebook Ads budgets.

• Fuel the winners: Identify your top 5-10 converting cities and double down on them. Use geo-targeting to allocate more of your ad spend to these proven locations.
• Exclude the underperformers: Are you spending money on ads in Miami but getting zero conversions? Consider excluding Miami from your campaign targeting to stop wasting money and improve your overall return on ad spend (ROAS).

3. Discover New Market Opportunities

Sometimes, the most interesting insights come from surprises. You might notice a steady, organic trickle of traffic from a city you've never targeted before, like Portland. This could signal an untapped market. Explore this by running a small, targeted test campaign in Portland to see if you can capitalize on this emerging interest before your competitors do.

Troubleshooting: Common Questions About City Data

While using the city report, you may run into a few things that seem confusing at first. These are usually easy to explain.

Why does "(not set)" appear in my City report?

The (not set) value in your reports means Google Analytics was unable to identify a city for that user's session. This happens for several reasons:

• Privacy Settings: Some users have privacy tools, extensions, or VPNs that mask their IP address, making geographic identification impossible.
• Manual UTM Tagging Issues: Sometimes, (not set) can appear alongside source/medium dimensions if marketing campaign URLs aren't tagged correctly.
• Data Glitches: Occasionally, individual hits of data just won’t carry location information.

Having a small percentage of your traffic attributed to (not set) is normal and not a cause for alarm.

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What is Data Thresholding?

If you see a notice at the top of your report about thresholding, it means GA4 is purposely hiding some rows of data. This is a privacy feature designed to prevent you from identifying individual users. It usually happens when you have a very small number of users in a particular report view (e.g., only one user from a very small town who also visited from a specific ad campaign). While it can be frustrating, it's a built-in privacy protection that’s working as intended.

Final Thoughts

Viewing your traffic by city in Google Analytics is a simple yet powerful way to understand your audience on a deeper level. By finding the core report and customizing it with secondary dimensions and filters, you can uncover actionable insights that sharpen your marketing strategy, optimize your ad spend, and open up new opportunities for growth.

While building these reports manually in GA4 is useful, the real insights often come from combining your web analytics with data from sales and advertising platforms. At Graphed, we make this instant and effortless. Rather than exporting CSVs and wrestling with spreadsheets, our tool lets you ask questions in plain English, like "Show me a comparison of GA4 user growth versus new Shopify customers in my top 5 cities this quarter." We connect your platforms, build a live dashboard in seconds, and give you back the time you’d have spent gathering data, so you can focus on acting on it instead.