11 GA4 Metrics You Should Track for Better Insights in 2025

Summary: There are several ways to measure business success using Google Analytics 4, but which metrics are responsible for your website’s success? Keep reading to know the most important GA4 metrics you must track for SEO success.

What is Metric in Google Analytics?

A metric is a measurable standard or index that you can visualize as a ratio or statistic. It helps businesses to outline every weakness, strength and area of improvement. Once you understand how to read these number-based reports, you can take your business to the next level.

Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is a powerful tool that helps optimize your user engagement while measuring and analyzing user activity. It embraces several nuances of user behavior and the workings of the most widely used marketing strategies. However, the vast display of numbers can quickly become overwhelming, especially without expert help.

With the many, many reports and numbers from your GA4 metrics, it is easy to get lost in the numbers and figures. Some of the most important metrics like bounce rate, conversion rate and average engagement rate needs attention. But first, you need to understand the importance of the tool Google Analytics for SEO success.

Why is Google Analytics Important for SEO Success?

Google Analytics gives you a report card of all your SEO efforts in great detail. With a wide range of metrics available, you can monitor how your website’s pages are progressing. A proper Google Analytics 4 setup allows you to track these metrics accurately and gain insights into your website’s performance. These insights form an integral part of marketing analytics, helping you identify opportunities to improve user engagement and optimize your website for better results.

Google Analytics also helps you identify problems and opportunities for both on-page SEO and technical SEO. It also helps point out what is working on your website and what can be improved based on your goals. This helps you understand where you should invest your time and resources.

Besides revealing where your website traffic is coming from, Google Analytics helps understand what users do after arriving on your website. Some of the most important questions it helps you answer are:

• Where is my website traffic coming from?
• Which content pages are performing the most and which pages have no traffic?
• Which content attracts leads and grows sales?
• Is more traffic coming from mobile devices or desktops?A well-structured google analytics dashboard makes it easier to analyze these insights efficiently, allowing businesses to track performance without feeling overwhelmed.

Top 11 GA4 Metrics to Track for SEO Success in 2025

When you’re trying to evaluate how your business is performing, you are asking a few important questions. What do users like about my website? Is my content bringing in more people? Am I achieving my SMART goals? What should I do differently? For every question you have, GA4 has a metric to help you answer it.

Take a look at the top GA4 metrics you need to evaluate today:

1. Users

The ‘users’ metric in Google Analytics 4 helps you understand your audience. It shows how many New users interact with your website and each webpage. Analyzing this metric helps understand how customers engage with your page and any positive growth dynamics.

2. Sessions

This metric tracks how many sessions start on your application or your webpage. While Universal Analytics’ session-scope concept has not come to GA4, it is still one of the most important metrics in your report. Not to mention the metric has also improved compared to the UA version since new sessions don’t get initiated in Google Analytics 4 if the same user browses your page again or enters from a different traffic source.

3. Engagement rate or bounce rate

This is one of the newest GA4 metrics that helps you understand how customers interact with your content. But how do you check the bounce rate in GA4?

Bounce rate was a highly-debated UA metric but has made a strong comeback in GA4. It originally referred to the total percentage of people who have left your website without any interaction or clicks, no matter how long they stayed on your website. However, GA4 brought back the metric with a different definition. So now, you start counting engagement if a user interaction meets any one of the following conditions:

• It lasts for over 10 seconds
• It leads to one or more conversions or conversion events
• It leads to two or more screen or page views

You can calculate your engagement rate as engagement sessions divided by Sessions. Engagement rate is a critical metric that helps you understand how to improve your user experience and how it’s being perceived in its current state. If the user does not meet any of the three conditions mentioned above, GA4 counts them as a bounced user.

4. Average engagement time

This underlying metric shows you exactly how long your webpage remained your user’s focus. In GA4 metrics, you can calculate the average engagement time by adding up the durations of user engagement per Active user. This is critical because it tells you everything you should know about your website’s user journey.

The average engagement time metric varies from business to business. Therefore, experts recommend that you look at these numbers across various timeframes. It also helps you evaluate several aspects of your website such as any existing content errors, page loading speed, and your UI’s user-friendliness – all decisive factors of active engagement.

5. Views

Views are everything in the world of SEO. This is one of the most critical engagement metrics as  it shows you how many times an app page or webpage was viewed. Evaluating this metric can really optimise your SEO strategy. It also helps you understand how your website is performing and which changes could impact your user’s behavior.

6. Event count

By discovering details of your user journey, you can better understand your customers on a whole new level. But what is event count in Google Analytics 4? The event count metric accounts for the total number of times a unique user triggers an event. The insights generated from this metric can help you create a more unique user experience. And one of the most important things that Google tracks is a positive user response to a website. This metric helps you achieve this goal and come closer to a high SERP ranking.

7. Conversions

The conversions metric in GA4 tells you how many times a user triggered an event on your website that is valuable for your business. Data from conversions is essential while evaluating business performance. By tracking your users’ key actions, you can optimize your user journey to improve your ROI. The conversions metric tracks your user engagement while pointing out how user-friendly your website is, how your digital marketing campaigns have performed and what drives your customers’ behavior.

8. Lifetime value

This is a critical metric to evaluate your users’ lifetime performance and determine how valuable they are for your business. You can also analyze lifetime value in GA4 to decide which methods help you drive in more high-value customers. This metric is also a great way to understand how much money you will have to invest in new customer acquisition.

9. Total revenue

The GA4 metric for total revenue represents the total of your revenue from subscriptions, advertising and purchases. This helps you measure your performance against your preset objectives. By reviewing and analyzing these numbers, your business can monitor sales dynamics to review and adjust your strategy wherever necessary. Additionally, total revenue helps track your sales over a period of time and ensures you identify feasible solutions to generate more revenue.

10. Advertiser ad clicks

If you are running ad campaigns, this is one of the most critical metrics for you. It shows how many times a user clicks on your ad to reach the desired destination. Once you link your GA4 account to the third-party advertising platform, this metric becomes readily available in your reports.

11. Referral traffic

The referral traffic metric analyzes data related to platforms that link back to your website. This is different from a user clicking on a direct link from a SERP that leads to your website. This is a critical factor for SEO success as referral traffic creates important backlinks to your website in addition to driving higher website traffic. This raises your domain’s authority and positively impacts your search engine ranking.

Use GA4 The Right Way With The Help of Right Experts

GA4 is a powerful asset that can help create custom reports and metrics to better understand the performance of your website. However, to fully leverage its capabilities, it is often beneficial to partner with a GA4 Consulting agency that specializes in optimizing Google Analytics for businesses across different industries. Additionally, working with an experienced SEO company can help you seamlessly integrate GA4 insights into your SEO strategy, ensuring that your website is continuously improving based on data-driven decisions. An expert agency can provide industry-specific support, optimizing user engagement, increasing traffic, and boosting conversions for your unique needs.