What Can I Do with Google Analytics?

Your website gets traffic every day, but where do those visitors come from, and what do they do once they arrive? Google Analytics is the key to answering these questions. In this article, you'll learn exactly what you can do with Google Analytics - from understanding your audience and tracking your marketing to measuring what truly matters to your business.

First, What Is Google Analytics?

In simple terms, Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Think of it as a census bureau for your website. It collects anonymous data about your visitors and organizes it into reports that help you make smarter decisions about your website and marketing efforts.

Today, the standard version is Google Analytics 4. It's built differently from its predecessor (Universal Analytics) and focuses more on user interactions and the events they trigger - like clicking a button, scrolling down a page, or making a purchase - giving you a more complete picture of the customer journey.

At first glance, GA4 can feel intimidating. There are dozens of reports and more metrics than you can count. But you only need to focus on a few key areas to get enormous value out of it.

Understand Your Audience: Who are Your Visitors?

One of the first things you'll want to know is who is visiting your site. Not their names or email addresses, but their general characteristics. This helps you confirm if you're reaching your target audience or if you need to adjust your strategy. You can find this data under the Reports > User > User attributes reports.

Geographic Location (Demographics)

The Demographics report shows you which countries, regions, and cities your visitors are coming from. This is incredibly useful for tailoring your content and marketing.

Example in action: You run an e-commerce store based in the United States but notice in your Demographics report that 20% of your traffic is coming from the United Kingdom. This might be a signal to:

• Offer shipping to the UK.
• Display prices in Pounds (£) for those visitors.
• Run ads specifically targeting a UK audience.

Technology Used (Tech details)

Is your audience using mobile phones, desktops, or tablets? Are they on Chrome, Safari, or another browser? The Tech details report gives you this breakdown. This information is critical for ensuring everyone has a good user experience.

Example in action: You check your tech report and see that 75% of your visitors are on mobile devices. This is a clear sign to pull up your website on your own phone and ask an honest question: is it easy to navigate? Does it load fast? A clunky mobile experience isn't just a minor annoyance - it’s a massive barrier that will cost you traffic and sales. Prioritizing your mobile design becomes a data-driven decision, not just a guess.

Discover How Visitors Find Your Website

Knowing who your visitors are is great, but knowing how they found you is where you can start making real improvements to your marketing. This information lives in the Reports > Acquisition section. This area tells you which channels are driving traffic to your site.

Understanding Your Traffic Channels

GA4 breaks down your traffic into several key "session default channel groupings":

• Organic Search: Visitors who arrived after searching on a search engine like Google or Bing and clicked a non-ad link. This is your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) traffic.
• Direct: People who typed your website URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark. This often indicates brand awareness and repeat visitors.
• Referral: Visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website (e.g., a blog that mentioned you).
• Organic Social: People who came from a non-ad link on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
• Paid Search: Traffic from paid advertising on search engines, like Google Ads.
• Email: Visitors who clicked a link in one of your email campaigns.

Example in action: By looking at your Traffic acquisition report, you discover that Organic Search is your biggest source of visitors, but your Referral traffic from a recent guest post on another blog converted to more newsletter signups. This insight tells you two things: your SEO is working well to bring in volume, but partnerships and guest blogging might be a more effective way to get high-quality leads.

See What Visitors Do On Your Website

Once someone lands on your site, what happens next? Do they read your content? Watch a video? Fill out a form? The Engagement reports in Google Analytics (under Reports > Engagement) help you understand how people interact with your site.

Find Your Most Popular Pages

The Pages and screens report is your website's greatest hits list. It shows you which pages get the most views, how long people stay on them (average engagement time), and how many unique users have seen them.

Your most popular pages are a goldmine of information about what your audience cares about. These are the topics and landing pages that resonate the most.

Example in action: You notice that an old blog post titled "10 Quick SEO Tips for Small Businesses" is consistently one of your top 5 most visited pages. Armed with this data, you could:

• Update and republish the post with new information to keep it fresh.
• Create a "Part 2" or a more in-depth guide on the same topic.
• Add a link within that post to promote a related service or product you offer.

Track Important User Actions with Events

In GA4, every important interaction a user takes is tracked as an "event." Some are automatically collected, like page_view (when a page loads) or scroll (when someone scrolls 90% of the way down a page). You can also create custom events for actions specific to your site, like watching a video or clicking a specific button.

Monitoring these events helps you see if people are actually engaging with the key features of your pages, far beyond just looking at page views.

Measure What Matters: Tracking Goals with Conversions

This is where Google Analytics goes from being a "nice to have" tool to a business-critical one. While all events track actions, some actions are more valuable than others. When an event is particularly important to your business, you can mark it as a Conversion.

A conversion is a completed activity that contributes to the success of your business. It's the moment a visitor completes a desired goal. Setting these up allows you to measure what is actually working and what isn't.

Examples of Common Conversions

• E-commerce Website: The most obvious conversion is the purchase event.
• Lead Generation Site: A form submission (often tracked as a generate_lead event).
• Blog/Content Site: Signing up for a newsletter (like a sign_up event).
• SaaS Business: Starting a free trial or booking a demo.

Tracking conversions moves you past simple traffic metrics (like views and users) and connects your marketing efforts directly to business results. You can set them up by navigating to Admin > Conversions and toggling an existing event to mark it as a conversion.

Answering Real Business Questions with Your Data

Once you're comfortable with these core reports, you can start combining data to answer important strategic questions. This is about connecting the dots between audience, acquisition, and behavior to tell a complete story.

Here are a few common business questions you can now answer:

1. "Which marketing channel drives the most sales?"

Instead of just looking at which channel brings the most traffic, you can look at which brings the most conversions. Go to your Acquisition > Traffic acquisition report. The default view shows you users and sessions, but you can see a "Conversions" column right there. Analyzing your marketing ROI instantly becomes clearer. Maybe Facebook brings more clicks, but Google Organic Search brings users who actually buy.

2. "Is our new landing page working well?"

You've launched a new page for a product. How's it performing? Go to the Engagement > Pages and screens report and find your page in the list. Check its key metrics:

• Views: Are people even finding the page?
• Average engagement time: If it's a long page, but the engagement time is 10 seconds, people aren’t reading it.
• Conversions: Is this page actually getting people to convert (e.g., make a purchase or submit a form), a goal it was designed for?

3. "Do mobile visitors convert as often as desktop visitors?"

Go back to the Reports > Tech > Tech details report. You can see a breakdown of users by device category (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet). Just like in the acquisition report, this table also shows a "Conversions" column. Now you can easily compare the conversion rate for different device types. If your mobile conversion rate is dramatically lower than desktop despite high mobile traffic, you know you have a user experience issue to fix on smaller screens.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics offers a powerful, free way to understand who your website visitors are, how they found you, and what they do. By focusing on your audience, acquisition channels, on-site behavior, and key conversion goals, you can turn raw data into actionable insights that drive real business growth.

While GA4 is incredibly powerful, diving through all the different reports to piece an answer together can be time-consuming. That’s why we built Graphed. After a one-click connection to your Google Analytics account, you can simply ask questions in plain English like, "Which country sends us the most paying customers?" or "Create a dashboard showing my top landing pages by organic traffic this month." We turn hours of digging into 30-second conversations, so you can get the answers you need without having to become a data analyst.