GA4 opens on a dashboard of numbers that mostly do not help you decide anything. The useful part is small, and once you know which five things to look at the whole tool takes ten minutes a month.
Before anything: define a conversion
Analytics without a conversion is a traffic counter. Decide the one action that means someone became a lead — a form submission, a WhatsApp click, a phone tap — and mark it as a key event in GA4.
Until this is done, every number below is interesting and none of it is actionable. This is also the single most common gap we find in accounts that have been running for a year.
The five things worth looking at
- Conversions, and where they came from. Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition, with your key event as the metric. This is the only report that answers "is any of this working".
- Which pages bring people in. Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens, sorted by entrances. Usually a surprise, and it tells you what to write more of.
- Channel mix. How much is organic search, paid, social, direct. If it is almost all paid, you are renting your traffic.
- Mobile versus desktop, split by conversion rate rather than just sessions. If mobile is most of your traffic and converts at a fraction of desktop, you have a mobile problem worth more than any campaign.
- Engagement rate on your main landing pages. A page that people arrive at and immediately leave is either the wrong traffic or the wrong page.
What to ignore
- Realtime. Satisfying, useless. It tells you nothing you can act on.
- Average session duration on its own. A long session can mean engaged or lost.
- Day-to-day wobble. Compare month to month, or this month against the same month last year. Weekly figures for a small site are mostly noise.
- Most of Explore. Powerful and not where a business owner should start.
Three settings worth fixing today
- Data retention. It defaults to two months, which means next year you cannot compare against this one. Admin → Data settings → Data retention → 14 months. It is not retroactive, so the sooner the better.
- Time zone and currency. Set to Dhaka and BDT, or every day boundary and every value is wrong.
- Internal traffic. Filter out your own office, or your team's visits inflate everything.
GA4 and Search Console answer different questions
GA4 tells you what people did once they arrived. Search Console tells you what they searched to get there, and what you nearly rank for. For deciding what to write next, Search Console is the more useful of the two — see keyword research without paid tools.
Link them, so Search Console data appears inside GA4 and you stop opening two tabs.
A ten-minute monthly routine
- Conversions this month versus last. Up, down, flat?
- Which channel produced them.
- Top five entry pages — any new ones?
- Mobile conversion rate versus desktop.
- Write down one thing to change, and check it next month.
That is the whole job. Everything else in GA4 is for answering a specific question you have not asked yet.
If your analytics is installed but nothing is configured — no conversions, default retention, no Search Console link — that is the usual state, and it is what our SEO service sets up first, because none of the rest can be measured without it.