Howdy!
Measuring the success of your SEO efforts is critical to maximizing your SEO investment and growing your company’s online presence.
If you don’t measure your SEO initiatives, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not, resulting in wasted time, money, and energy.
I don’t want that for you! And I know you don’t want that either.
In this blog post, I share what I think is the most important Google Analytics 4 (GA4) metric for measuring SEO performance (if I had to pick just one), including a quick step-by-step guide on how to access it.
Please note that I’m talking about the new Google Analytics 4 platform here and not the previous version of Google Analytics. Also, please know other fantastic metrics and a wealth of information for measuring search performance can be found in the Google Search Console, which is a separate platform from Google Analytics. I will probably write a future blog post about those metrics!
Now with that out of the way, let’s begin!
The Key Google Analytics 4 Metric for Measuring SEO: “New Users by Organic Search”
Quality organic search traffic is the gold for SEO miners.
What is organic search traffic?
Organic search traffic is people coming to your website via a search engine. These people are searching for something (like information about a problem, product, service, and so on), they see a link to your content in a search engine results page, and they click on your link.
This is immensely valuable! If your website is achieving this, that means you’re attracting people to your website who are already showing interest in your content. This is called “showing intent” in the marketing world.
These moments are good opportunities for organizations to generate leads, make sales, book appointments, build relationships with customers, and so on.
It’s vital to measure organic search traffic in order to measure SEO success. That’s why “New Users from Organic Search” is one of the most important GA4 metrics for measuring SEO performance.
A “New User” (in GA4) is someone coming to your website for the first time within a specified date range. Like I’ve been describing, a primary goal of SEO is to attract new people to your website. The “New Users” metric is a critical ingredient in measuring that.
However, the “New Users” metric measures new people coming to your website from a variety of sources, known as “channels”. Examples of these channels are:
- Direct – a person visits your website by typing your website’s URL into their browser’s address bar and hitting ‘enter’
- Social – a person comes to your website via a social media link
- Organic Search – a person comes to your website via a search engine
The channel that matters most when it comes to measuring SEO is the “Organic Search” channel, for reasons we discussed earlier!
So, one of the best Google Analytics 4 metrics for measuring SEO performance is New Users from the Organic Search channel.
Now let’s look at how to access it!
How to Access “New Users from Organic Search” in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Here’s a quick step-by-step guide on how to access this critical SEO metric.
1. Log in to your GA4 account. Hover over the menu on the left side of the page and click “Reports”.
2. Click the dropdown arrow next to “Acquisition” and select “User Acquisition”. Notice the “Organic Search” data that appears in the chart on the right side of the page.
3. Scroll down on the report to locate the numerical value for Total Users from Organic Search.
And…voila! You’ve officially located the “New Users by Organic Search” metric in Google Analytics 4, which is one of the most important GA4 metrics for measuring SEO performance! Paying attention to this number is an important step in maximizing your SEO investment.
And to quickly reiterate…there are other important metrics in GA4 for evaluating SEO success, like sessions by organic search, click through rate, engagement rate, and so on. For this blog post, I wanted to share one of – if not the – most valuable metrics in my opinion!
Also like I stated earlier, the Google Search Console platform has extremely valuable SEO metrics, like keyword ranking information, clicks, impressions, and more. I love using Google Search Console to better understand how a website is performing in search, and I plan on writing a future blog post to discuss that information as well. Stay tuned and thank you for reading!
