Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Junior SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Organic traffic is users coming to your site due to natural visibility, by ranking on search engines due to the quality of content you have created. Other ways users could come to your site is by directly typing in your URL, through social media channels or through paid advertising. For Search Engine Optimisation it is important to be able to monitor organic traffic levels as it is a good indicator of how your SEO is performing.
What is Google Analytics 4?
Google Analytics 4 is a free tool from Google that allows users to monitor and analyse website data to make informed decisions. You can set up GA4 in different ways to monitor metrics on your website such as e-commerce tracking, organic performance, device type and more.
It is important to note that businesses should make sure their GA4 accounts are set up correctly, because if not, you could be receiving inaccurate traffic measurements. One way to do this is by cross referencing the data with other data sources. For example, Google also offers another free platform, Google Search Console, GSC is a platform that allows users to monitor and improve their websites performance in Google Search. You can also monitor organic performance in GSC and check your analytics account syncs up.
How to monitor Organic traffic in GA4
By accessing the reports tab in Google Analytics 4 a number of customisable website reports will become available to you including the real time reports, acquisition reports and engagement reports. There are two main traffic acquisition reports that help us analyse data in GA4.
- User Acquisition Report – This report tells us how different users were acquired including total users, new users and returning users and where they came from e.g. organic search, direct, paid search etc.
- Traffic Acquisition Report – The traffic acquisition report is similar to the user acquisition report as it tells us how much traffic has been coming through the site. This isn’t necessarily individual users but it could be one user having multiple sessions.
There is also more information available on the acquisition overview page such as including the source that users are coming from such e.g. Google, Bing etc.
Why its important
Organic performance is important for driving long-term growth that is sustainable for business. Therefore knowing how to track, monitor and analyse organic performance is important for making informed strategic marketing decisions.
