What is a goal in GA4?
GA4 calls them conversions. A conversion records when a visitor does what you want, such as submitting a form, clicking a phone number or buying, and once it is set up it appears in every report.
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Google Analytics was installed but nobody looked at it
Four things, once a month, in about ten minutes: how many people visited, where they came from, which pages they looked at and where they left. 32 out of 55 businesses I audited had Google Analytics installed, and barely any were looking at the data. Then set up one goal, so the reports show how many visitors did the thing that matters, such as sending an enquiry, rather than only how many arrived.
What do you miss by not looking at your analytics?
Evidence for every decision about the website, marketing and content. Without it you do not know which pages people visit (a blog post from two years ago may get three times the traffic of your services page), where visitors come from, where they leave, or whether anything you changed made a difference. The usual reason is understandable: you log in, see a wall of graphs, close the tab, and six months later cannot find the login.
Teams with plenty of data fall into a similar hole. Nobody owns it, because the dashboards were set up by an analyst who left or an agency whose project ended. The dashboards track activity rather than outcomes, so "engagement up 12%" says nothing about revenue. And revenue, ad spend and traffic sit in separate systems nobody has time to join. Each of those is fixable in a quarter, usually for less than the cost of one mid-level marketing hire.
What happened when one business finally looked?
It found it had been advertising to the wrong page. The business was running Facebook ads to its homepage, which had a bounce rate above 80%: people were arriving and leaving at once. The page it should have been sending them to was buried three clicks deep and converted five times better. Ten minutes in Google Analytics showed what months of ad spend had hidden. The ads were fine; the landing page was the problem.
Which four things should you check each month?
Visitors, sources, pages and exits. First, how many people visited, from the Users number on the overview, and whether it is rising, falling or flat. Second, where they came from: organic search, direct, social or referral. If 90% is direct, almost nobody is finding you through search; if social is zero, your social media is not driving visits. Third, which pages they looked at, and whether any page is getting unexpected traffic or none at all. Fourth, where they left: a high bounce rate on a blog post can be normal, and on a homepage or service page it is a problem.
Why set up a goal?
Because a goal records the thing that matters. In GA4 goals are called conversions, and one tracks when a visitor submits a contact form, clicks a phone number or completes a purchase. The difference between "we had 500 visitors this month" and "we had 500 visitors and 12 of them sent an enquiry" is the difference between data and insight. Setup takes about ten minutes by following Google's own guide, and once it is done the conversion data appears in every report.
Where should you start if you have not looked for months?
Log in today and look at the overview page. The numbers might surprise you, and that surprise is probably the most useful thing that will happen to the business this week.
Related evidence: 55 digital audits. Here’s what I found.. Next in this journey: “Our web developer disappeared”.
Questions people ask
What does a high share of direct traffic mean?
If around 90% of visitors arrive direct, very few are finding you through search, which usually points to an SEO problem.
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