We entered 2023 talking about GA4 and we’re doing the same in 2024. Frequent readers of Search Engine Land, and all SEOs for that matter, know why: GA4 wasn’t ready for prime time when Google forced us to change, and we’re still working through issues months later.
That said, I’ve managed to hone in on some extremely valuable GA4 reports that I’m using to help my clients set their course for organic growth in 2024. Let’s dive into:
Which are. How to set them up. What they show you How to use knowledge.
Report 1: Landing Page Performance
This report will analyze landing page performance segmented by channel. Choose the most relevant date range you want to study; for example, I usually use it as a monthly or quarterly review.
mechanics
First, go to Interaction > Landing Page:
Next, make sure you’ve added a conversion column and specify the main conversion you want to analyze (here, we’re looking at form submissions):
For an additional layer of insights, add a Source/Medium dimension to your report:
What does it show you?
This gives marketers a neat look at some opportunities.
First, if you sort by descending sessions, you can see the most viewed landing pages and quickly assess which ones are lagging behind in conversion rate.
This should trigger an inspection of the page, whether it is optimized for conversion, regardless of the traffic source.
You can then sort by lowest sessions and look for low-volume pages with recorded conversions. They may be more niche, but they can help you identify conversion-friendly properties and/or topics that you can duplicate with additional ad spend.
Based on your landing page and channel performance, you’ll also be able to see, among other statistics, which channels may need landing page ad optimization.
How are your strategy ideas focused?
First, high-volume landing pages that attract a lot of ad spend (and/or organic attention) and few conversions should be at the top of your list of properties to optimize in 2024.
You may also want to run your product team’s list to assess whether there are market misalignments or competitive disadvantages hinted at by page performance.
Second, lower-volume pages that do manage to convert users should have some ideas about what works that you should try to replicate or expand with additional resources.
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Report 2: Content Gap Analysis
You don’t need a lot of GA4 manipulation for this one – what you need is an idea of the segments you want to audit for content.
This could mean stages of the buying journey (top, middle, bottom), primary products/services, or types of audiences/personas.
mechanics
You can use the landing page report above to determine the size of the list you want to study. Download the top 20, 50 or 100 (for example) landing pages and start ranking them according to your target segments.
What does it show you?
When you’re done, you’ll see clearly which segments need attention in 2024.
A common use case (and the result) is an analysis of content gaps by stages of the buying journey, where blogs fill the top of the funnel, resources and About pages in the middle and pages like “Get in touch”, prices and comparison. charts address the bottom of the funnel.
This report allows you to track how many of each type of page you’re creating and assess the mix of content each stage represents. You might find something like, out of 100 pieces of content on your website, 90 of them are thought leadership blog posts and 10 of them are contact and lower funnel pages, but the middle of the funnel is poorly represented.
I often find that brands have overloaded their content in the middle of the funnel, talking about themselves and their products. This comes at the expense of top-of-funnel content that builds brand and product awareness and gets users on the journey to begin with.
How are your strategy ideas focused?
Make sure you align with your overall business goals before acting on the findings of your content gap analysis. If, for example, your company’s top priority is to build awareness of a particular product, the analysis you just ran showing a lack of content for other products is something to hide but not act on.
Ideally, the analysis would show a clear opportunity to contribute to your main business goals. If there is a focused audience (for example, CFOs) where there is content but room for more, you can drill down to:
Review the specific CFO topics you’ve already covered and look to optimize those pages. Create CFO-related content to cover what you haven’t touched on yet.
Report 3: Funnel exploration
This report allows you to choose a top landing page (or several) and analyze how users behave once they arrive there. One of my favorite use cases is to see how many people convert from blog posts, which I’ll show in the example below.
mechanics
First, go to Explorations > Funnel Exploration:
Edit your funnel steps:
Next, set up your flow. I then specified that the first page visited must contain /resources (which is the client’s blog URL) and added a conversion event (closed contact form) as an additional step that must be completed in some time during the user’s visit. :
Add a first user media dimension or breakdown if you want to see the channel that brought the user to your page. In this example, I was able to provide the client with some very interesting data:
What does it show you?
This example showed that while the client was successfully driving people to their site through blog content (mostly from organic sources), the blog rarely converted.
This is a call to action to change your conversion strategies; for example, examine the CTA to see if it aligns with the type of content the user is consuming.
How are your strategy ideas focused?
The example above shows you how to identify large parts of your earned properties ripe for conversion optimization, but you can use the Funnel Exploration report in a number of ways.
One thing I like to show clients is to start with the home page, ask them to define the journey they’d like users to take, and run the report to see how many are actually following.
If the number is lower than expected, outline some UX tests to understand why and strategize to be more proactive in driving users where you want them to go.
Set your SEO 2024 course with these 3 valuable GA4 reports
Ultimately, I still think GA4 will be a useful platform that will be a necessary point of contact for marketing teams, especially if the platform can incorporate information about SGE as Google expands that footprint.
While we’re all (hopefully) trying to stick to our 2024 resolutions, try to roll up your sleeves and make the most of what GA4 has to offer. If Google meets us halfway and makes the platform more intuitive and consistent, the fluency with its levers will eventually be worth the time and effort.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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