Attracting more website traffic is the primary purpose of search engine optimization (SEO).

But after putting so much work into boosting your search engine rankings, how can you tell if it translates into more visitors? And how can you tell if your site lives up to those visitors’ expectations?

The answer lies in accurately tracking your traffic.

In this post, we’ll walk you through the process of measuring your website traffic with Google Analytics (GA4).

But first, let’s address why you should care about tracking your traffic in the first place.

Before we address how to measure your traffic, it’s worth becoming familiar with the key traffic metrics you’ll find in GA4.
 

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most important metrics:
Users: This is the number of distinct individuals who visited your site. “New users” are those who visited your site for the first time, while “returning users’ are those who also visited in the past.

Sessions: This counts the number of distinct browsing sessions users had on your site. A session begins as soon as a visitor lands on your website and finishes after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Pageviews: This is the number of times your pages were viewed, including repeated views by the same user during a single session.

Engaged sessions: These are any sessions that last more than ten seconds, include a key event, or have two or more pageviews.

Engagement rate: The percentage of engaged sessions on your site.

Bounce rate: The percentage of non-engaged sessions on your site. A high bounce rate can be a sign that your site isn’t meeting user expectations.

Average engagement time: This measures the average amount of time users spent focused on your site (i.e., not when your site is open in another tab or window that the user isn’t currently viewing).

Key events: An action a user takes that is important to the business, such as form submissions, free-trial signups, or purchases. Key events used to be called “conversions” until recently.

Entrances and exits: These tell you the number of sessions that started and ended on a specific