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Google Analytics 4: where do your visitors come from?

More than a visitor counter

How many people visit your website? Where do they come from? Which pages lead them to contact you? Google Analytics 4 (GA4) helps you make decisions about your content and campaigns based on evidence rather than guesswork.

You do not need to follow every metric. Start with three questions: where do visitors come from, what do they look at, and do they take an action that matters to your business? GA4 analyses what happens on your website. Google Search Console adds insight into how you appear in search results; Microsoft Clarity helps you understand clicking and scrolling behaviour.

1. Connect GA4 to your Demona website

  1. Open Google Analytics, create a GA4 property and add a web data stream for your website's address.
  2. Copy the measurement ID, which starts with G-, from the web data stream details.
  3. In the Demona editor, open Settings → Marketing → Analytics and paste it into the Google Analytics 4 field.
  4. Enable and configure your cookie consent banner under Settings → Marketing → Cookies, then save your analytics settings.
  5. Open the public website in a private browser window, accept statistics cookies and check the Realtime report in Google Analytics.

For the complete technical setup, see Analytics and tracking. Demona starts GA4 only after the visitor gives the required consent.

Two common measurement mistakes

Avoid double counting. If you install GA4 directly in Demona and again through Google Tag Manager, a single page view may be counted twice. Choose a carefully planned setup. Demona sends its own page-view event when visitors navigate: in the GA4 web data stream's Enhanced measurement → Page views settings, disable measurement of page changes based on browser history events. In Tag Manager, handle the page_view event correctly and do not use a History Change trigger for this purpose.

Your reports do not represent every visitor. People who decline consent, as well as some browser protections, can mean fewer events are recorded than visits actually took place.

2. Four reports worth opening first

  • Realtime: are events reaching GA4 at all? Start here when you test the installation.
  • Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition: where sessions originate, such as organic Google Search, social media, ads or direct traffic.
  • Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens: which pages people view most and how they engage with them.
  • Landing page: which page visitors enter your website on. This is especially useful for campaigns and service pages.

Google Analytics menus vary depending on your report collection and permissions. If a report is missing, look for it in the reports library.

3. What do the key numbers mean?

  • Active users: distinct users who engaged during the selected period, according to GA4's definitions.
  • Sessions: visits that started. One person may return several times.
  • Page views: the number of times pages were viewed, not the number of people who visited.
  • Engagement rate: the share of sessions that qualify as engaged under GA4's rules; it is not a direct measure of customer satisfaction.
  • Key events: actions you decide are important, such as a successfully completed quote-request form when it is properly tracked.

A form submitted on a Demona website does not automatically become a GA4 key event just because the form and GA4 are both enabled. That requires separate event tracking and testing.

4. Find out which campaigns work

When you send people to your website from Facebook posts, newsletters or ads, use UTM parameters in your links. For example:

https://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=october

GA4 can then distinguish traffic from that campaign more reliably from other sources. Keep your naming consistent across campaigns, otherwise the results become fragmented.

Do not measure clicks alone: compare the pages campaign visitors read and whether they reach a quote request or another meaningful action.

5. Your ten-minute weekly check

  1. Set the reporting period to the previous seven days and, where possible, compare it with the week before.
  2. Check which two or three traffic sources and landing pages brought the most meaningful visits.
  3. Look for one notable change: for example, did Google traffic grow while enquiries stayed flat?
  4. Pick one thing to improve – a clearer heading, a better button label, a shorter form or more helpful copy – and check whether the outcome improves later.

To see how people actually use your pages, continue with our Microsoft Clarity guide. To understand your presence in Google Search, read about Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

TIPS AND TRICKS

First, check that your website is tracking correctly.

Demona's setup guide shows you where to enter your GA4 measurement ID and how it works with cookie consent.

Analytics and tracking →Cookie consent