What Should I Track in Google Analytics?

You've got Google Analytics set up, but staring at its dashboards can feel like looking at the cockpit of a fighter jet - dozens of buttons, dials, and flashing lights, with no clear indication of which ones actually matter. It's easy to get lost in a sea of data without finding any real answers. This article will cut through that noise, showing you exactly which metrics you should track in Google Analytics to understand your website's performance and make decisions that actually grow your business.

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Start by Asking Questions, Not Hunting for Metrics

Before you even open Google Analytics, take a step back. The most effective way to use any analytics tool is to start with clear questions about your business. The data is only useful if it helps you answer them. Pretty charts are nice, but actionable insights are what drive growth.

Most business questions you have about your website fall into four main categories:

• Audience: Who is visiting my site?
• Acquisition: How are they finding me?
• Behavior: What do they do once they're here?
• Conversions: Are they completing the actions I want them to take?

Every metric we discuss below will help you answer questions in one of these four areas. Gearing your analysis around these questions will turn analytics from a confusing chore into a powerful strategic tool.

Audience Metrics: Who Are Your Visitors?

Understanding who is coming to your site is the first step in creating better content, refining your marketing, and improving your product. These metrics paint a picture of your typical user.

Users and Sessions

This is the most basic measure of your website's traffic. A User is a unique individual who visits your site. A Session is a single visit by that user. If one person visits your site on Monday and again on Wednesday, that counts as one user and two sessions. Tracking Users shows you the size of your audience, while Sessions can indicate how frequently they return.

New vs. Returning Users

Are you attracting new people, or is your growth coming from a loyal base of existing visitors? A healthy website usually has a good mix of both. A high number of New Users shows your marketing and SEO efforts are succeeding at bringing fresh eyes to your site. A strong base of Returning Users shows that your content is valuable and engaging enough to make people want to come back.

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Demographics & Location (Geographic)

Learning basic information about your audience - like their age, gender, and location - can be incredibly valuable. If you discover that 80% of your audience is located in Canada, you can tailor your content and ad campaigns to that market. Similarly, knowing the primary age group visiting your site can help you tune your brand voice and messaging.

Devices (Technology)

Is your audience visiting your site on a desktop, mobile phone, or tablet? The answer has huge implications for your website's design and user experience. If you see that 70% of your traffic comes from mobile devices, you absolutely must ensure your website is fast, easy to navigate, and looks great on a small screen. Mobile optimization isn’t a nice-to-have, for most sites, it's a must.

Acquisition Metrics: How Do People Find You?

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Acquisition reports tell you which of your marketing channels are driving traffic so you know where to double down on your efforts and where to pull back.

Traffic Channels

Google Analytics automatically groups your incoming traffic into several default channels. Understanding them is fundamental to analyzing your marketing performance:

• Organic Search: Visitors who find you through a search engine like Google or Bing. This is a key indicator of your SEO health.
• Direct: Visitors who type your website URL directly into their browser or use a bookmark. This often represents your most loyal audience and brand loyalists.
• Referral: Visitors who click a link to your site from another website (not a search engine). This helps you see who is linking to you.
• Paid Search: Clicks coming from paid search ads, like Google Ads.
• Social: Traffic from social media platforms like Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Instagram.
• Email: Traffic from links within your email marketing campaigns.

Look at which channels drive the most traffic, but more importantly, which drive the most conversions.

Source / Medium

This report gives you a more specific look at your traffic sources. The Source is a specific origin, like 'google', 'facebook', or 'newsletter'. The Medium is the general category, like 'organic', 'cpc' (cost-per-click), or 'email'.

For example, you might see traffic from:

• google / organic
• facebook / cpc
• youtube / referral

This level of detail helps you distinguish between your paid Facebook campaigns (facebook / cpc) and your organic Facebook posts (facebook / referral).

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UTM & Campaign Tracking

To get the most out of your acquisition reports, you need to use UTM parameters. These are small bits of text you add to the end of your URLs to tell Google Analytics exactly where a click came from. For example, when you send out an email newsletter with a link to a new blog post, you can tag that URL.

Without UTM tags, all that traffic would just show up as 'Direct' or 'email'. With UTM tags, you can see in your Campaigns report that 150 people who converted came from your "SummerSale2024" email campaign. This is essential for measuring the ROI of specific emails, social media posts, and ad creative.

Behavior Metrics: What Are They Doing on Your Site?

Once visitors arrive, what do they do? Do they find what they're looking for and stick around, or do they leave immediately? Behavior metrics help you understand how engaging your content and user experience truly are.

Landing Pages

A landing page is the first page a visitor sees when they arrive on your site. The Landing Pages report is critical because it shows you your website’s "front doors." Analyze your top landing pages to see what’s working. Why are these pages so effective at drawing people in? Conversely, if a key landing page has high traffic but nobody clicks further into the site, you may have a problem with its content, design, or call-to-action.

Average Engagement Time

Formerly obsessed over, the "bounce rate" has been replaced by a more useful metric: Average Engagement Time. This measures the average length of time your website was the main focus in a user's browser. A longer engagement time generally signals that your content is valuable, relevant, and holding the visitor's attention. If your key content pages have an engagement time of only a few seconds, it’s a strong sign that the content isn't meeting user expectations.

Events

Not every important interaction on a website is a page view. Events allow you to track specific actions that visitors take, such as:

• Watching a video
• Clicking a "Download PDF" button
• Submitting a contact form
• Clicking an external link

Tracking events is a powerful way to understand behavior beyond just navigating from page to page. It tells you if users are actually interacting with the key features of your website.

Conversion Metrics: Are You Achieving Your Goals?

This is where everything comes together. You can have all the traffic in the world, but if none of those visitors are doing what you want them to do, your website isn’t succeeding. Conversions are the ultimate measure of success.

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Conversions (Goals)

A "conversion" is any completed activity that is important to the success of your business. If you take only one thing away from this article, let it be this: you must set up conversion tracking. Without it, you’re flying blind. Examples of conversions include:

• Making a purchase (for e-commerce)
• Submitting a lead form (for B2B)
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Creating an account
• Downloading a white paper

Go to the Admin section of Google Analytics and define these actions as conversion events. Once set up, you can see not only how many conversions occurred, but more importantly, exactly which traffic channels, campaigns, and landing pages drove them.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of sessions that result in a conversion. For example, if you had 100 sessions and 5 conversions, your conversion rate is 5%. This is one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for any business. It helps you measure how effective your website is at persuading visitors to take your desired actions. Analyzing conversion rates by channel, device, or landing page can reveal critical opportunities for optimization.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics offers a massive amount of data, but you don't need to track everything. The key is to focus on the metrics that help you answer fundamental business questions about your audience, acquisition channels, on-site behavior, and, most importantly, conversions. This focused approach is what turns raw data into clear, actionable decisions.

The real challenge often isn't just finding a metric in Google Analytics, it's connecting it to everything else, like your ad spend from Facebook Ads or your sales data from Shopify. Instead of spending hours pulling data and wrangling spreadsheets, we built Graphed to solve exactly this problem. You can connect your data sources in seconds and then use simple, natural language to get answers - like "compare revenue from Google organic search versus my paid Facebook campaigns" or "build a dashboard of my sales funnel." It’s designed to help you get straight to the insights, without having to become a data expert first.