Google Analytics 4: what to look at and what the numbers mean

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) shows you where your site's visitors come from, what they do there and how many of them do what you want, such as a purchase or a form submission. To read it correctly, you only need to understand two concepts, events and key events, and to know which few reports are worth opening.

This GA4 guide does not go into the technical setup. It explains what the basics mean, what to look at in Analytics every month and where the numbers do not tell the whole story.

Events and key events in simple terms

In GA4 everything is an event. Viewing a page is an event, and so is a click or a form submission. Some are recorded automatically. Enhanced measurement, which is usually switched on, adds others too, such as scrolling on the page, clicks on outbound links, site search, file downloads and views of embedded YouTube videos. Anything specific to your business, such as “requested a quote”, you define yourself, usually through Google Tag Manager.

Key events are the few events that have value for the business, and you mark them as such. In GA4 they used to be called conversions. Google changed the name in 2024 to distinguish them from Google Ads conversions, which are the ones campaigns work with. An example for a services website:

• Key events: submitting the quote form, clicking the phone number, clicking the email address or WhatsApp.
• Useful events that are not key events: downloading the price list, viewing the contact page, scrolling to the end of an article.

For an e-shop, the main key event is the purchase event, together with its value. The steps before it also help, such as adding to basket and beginning checkout, so you can see where customers drop off. Keep key events few. If everything is important, nothing is.

What to look at in Analytics: five reports

The names are as they appear in the English interface. In Greek or in a customised menu they may differ slightly.

1. Traffic acquisition: where visits came from, by channel, such as organic search, advertising, social, direct or email. Also look at the key events column, so you know which channel brings results and not just people.
2. Landing page: which pages visitors land on first and how many of them complete a key event. This is where you see which page needs work.
3. Pages and screens: which pages are read most overall, along with the average engagement time.
4. Events and key events: how many times each action happened. If a key event suddenly drops to zero, it is usually the tracking that broke, not the demand.
5. Tech: how many people come from mobile and how they behave compared with desktop. A form that is hard to use on mobile shows up here.

In the reports you will also see the engagement rate. A visit counts as “engaged” if it lasted longer than 10 seconds (the default), had a key event or had at least two page views. It is more useful than bounce rate, which in GA4 is simply its inverse.

Two settings are worth checking once: a filter for internal traffic, so your team's visits are not counted, and data retention, which is two months by default and which you can increase to 14 months for explorations.

Consent and gaps in the data

In Europe, Analytics cookies are usually set only after the visitor accepts them in the banner. Those who decline are not recorded in the same way as everyone else, and ad blockers or browser settings cut out another part of the measurement. That is why the numbers in Analytics are usually lower than what actually happened.

Consent Mode is the mechanism that tells Google's tags what the visitor chose. Depending on how it is set up, and on whether the site meets Google's requirements, some of the missing traffic can be estimated with modelling. You will find the details in our article on Consent Mode v2. In practice:

• Look at trends and ratios, not just absolute numbers. If enquiries from a channel are rising month by month, that matters more than the exact figure.
• Compare with reality: how many forms arrived in your inbox or how many orders the e-shop recorded. The difference tells you how big the gap in your measurement is.
• Do not send personal data to Analytics, such as email addresses or phone numbers inside page URLs or events. Google's terms prohibit it.
• After every change to the site or the banner, make a test submission and check whether it appears in the Realtime report or in DebugView.

Linking to Search Console and Google Ads

In GA4 Admin, under Product links, you connect Analytics to other Google tools. Two are almost always worth linking:

• Google Search Console: brings into Analytics the searches people use to find you on Google, next to how visitors behave on the site. After linking, you may need to enable the relevant reports from the Library so that they appear in the menu.
• Google Ads: you see in Analytics what the campaigns brought in, and you can import key events into Google Ads as conversions and use Analytics audiences in your ads, where the visitor's consent allows it.

A common mistake: the same action is counted twice in Google Ads, once by the Google Ads tag and once from Analytics, and both are set as primary conversions. The campaigns then “see” double the results. Choose one source as primary for each action.

At THPAUL we start with a measurement plan: which actions matter for the business. We set up GA4 and Tag Manager, pixel and conversions for Meta and Google, check forms and landing pages and build a dashboard that is easy to read, with a consent mechanism for visitors. If you already have Analytics, we check what is there and fix whatever is missing or measuring incorrectly.