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Tracking standard metrics isn’t enough – while many businesses monitor page views, bounce rates, and similar metrics, only a few are really taking advantage of these insights to acquire new customers.
You should understand what’s bringing people in, what’s driving them away, and—most importantly—how to get them to stay and convert
So, what metrics should you actually pay attention to? And how can you leverage those insights to consistently bring in new customers?
That’s what we set out to discover in our latest Databox survey. We partnered up with Analytics That Profit, Business Builders, and other partners and surveyed 100+ companies to see if and how companies leverage their website analytics to improve their marketing and sales performance.
We also had a DBUG session where dozens of professionals gathered to discuss these survey insights. The live session featured four experts and delivered numerous insights that we will also cover.
Here’s what we learned:
Let’s first start with the who – most respondents we talked to work in companies with 50 employees or fewer. It seems like small to mid-sized teams are the ones who are increasingly using analytics to compete.
We also found that 94.29% of surveyed companies are currently using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track user interactions and website performance.
For many, GA4 has become indispensable and it’s still the go-to tool for businesses that want comprehensive user insights and conversion tracking.
In addition, 93.33% of respondents use Google Search Console to gain insights into how users find their websites through online searches. With Search Console, these marketers can actively analyze how keywords and search behaviors drive visitors to their sites.
Marco Giordano, one of our DBUG experts, shared a strategy to maximize the power of these tools:
“I recommend for both data sources to use a BigQuery connector because you get much more data, especially with Search Console. Google likes to hide some of your data, and BigQuery just gives you more.”
Regular analysis is also essential for these companies. Most respondents review GA4 and Search Console data at least on a weekly basis to stay on top of website performance and understand user behavior.
Furthermore, 77.14% of respondents are using ‘Custom Events’ and ‘Conversions’ inside GA4.
This advanced feature helps them closely track specific user actions and personalize marketing activities to meet specific engagement goals.
In our DBUG session, Phil Wiseman of Analytics That Profit talked about the importance of this advanced feature, noting that while his organization finds it essential, many others have yet to catch up:
“80 percent of businesses they work with don’t have custom events or ROI measurements, which often creates baseless numbers rather than meaningful metrics.”
Phil Wiseman
Founder at Analytics That Profit
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Another key insight is that 69.52% of surveyed companies believe assigning a monetary value to conversions in GA4 has helped them measure the direct impact of online efforts on revenue.
By assigning these values, marketers can link website interactions to revenue outcomes.
Finally, we found that the average satisfaction rating for the combined capabilities of GA4 and Search Console stands at 7 out of 10.
This suggests that while these tools help with marketing and sales, they don’t quite deliver everything marketers need.
Our survey results are connected to the Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 Benchmark Group, which provides performance data from a broad sample of ~8,000 companies.
This benchmark data shows you how companies across different industries are performing, so you see where your own metrics stand compared to others.
In October 2024, benchmark data showed a median of 1.22K clicks across 2,920 contributors.
However, top-performing companies reached a median of 5.6K clicks, which shows how big of a difference in user engagement high-performing sites can achieve.
Conversions show an even more striking contrast. Median conversions in October stood at 232 across 5,559 contributors, but companies in the top quartile had a median of 1.71K conversions—7x higher.
If you’re using GA4 or GSC, we invite you to join our exclusive benchmark group – Google Search Console and GA4 Performance Benchmarks.
Once you join, you’ll be able to anonymously compare your website’s performance against thousands of other companies—at no cost.
Simply connect your account to the group (it’s 100% anonymous) and start getting insights that can help you optimize your strategy.
Not using these specific tools? You can still explore our Benchmark Groups tool and find cohorts that match your industry and goals.
GA4 and Search Console don’t just provide data – they drive strategy.
Here’s how top brands are turning these insights into measurable wins:
Cornerstone content is the high-value pages on your site—product pages, key service guides, and long-form articles—that directly drive customer conversions and revenue.
Instead of chasing every traffic fluctuation, focusing on cornerstone content helps brands zero in on what truly impacts the bottom line.
Matt Edens of Knowmad Digital Marketing explains how they use cornerstone content to “avoid reactionary responses to shifting traffic trends. With GA4 and GSC integrated through Screaming Frog, we monitor the performance of high-value URLs that drive commercial and transactional traffic, ensuring our efforts are tied to client business goals.”
“For instance, following Google’s March 2024 Core & Spam Updates, a waterproofing client in North Carolina experienced a 40% drop in new users quarter-over-quarter. By analyzing cornerstone content, we found that while overall traffic decreased, impressions and clicks to key commercial pages had actually doubled.
This insight reassured our client that high-value traffic remained strong, even as informational page traffic dropped. This approach underscores our shift away from prioritizing high-volume informational content and toward content that builds topical authority and directly engages target audiences.”
Google Search Console (GSC) provides insights into which keywords are leading people to your site, so you can get a direct view into what topics and terms are resonating with your audience.
You can then combine this data with tools like Semrush to find keyword gaps, new content opportunities, and make tweaks to existing blogs.
While this process often involves some trial and error, markers use it to refine their content based on real search data.
Adam Bockler of ONEFIRE explained how they use GSC to “track keywords people are searching to find our clients’ sites. Then I’ll use that in combination with Semrush to improve a blog post using that information. But it’s a bit of a guessing game, if I’m being honest.”
For Sonika Mehta of Zonka Feedback, integrating GA4 with GSC added another layer of insight.
They examined keyword-driven traffic and behavioral data together to find high-performing keywords they can direct to surveys and feedback tools, which led to a 40% increase in website visits.
Here’s what they shared:
“Integrating Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with Google Search Console has greatly enhanced Zonka Feedback’s digital marketing strategy. By leveraging insights from both platforms, we identified high-performing keywords that drove organic traffic to our surveys and feedback tools. This optimization led to a 40% increase in website visits and a 25% improvement in conversion rates.”
John Reinesch of Exponential Growth also shared how, with these two tools, they are able to “get a good picture of which keywords are driving the most organic traffic and which pieces of content are driving the most conversions. We used this integration with our own website and were able to reallocate some of our marketing budget towards content creation since we were able to determine our blog was our biggest source of new leads.”
PRO TIP: Want to stay on top of your blog’s performance in real-time, without having to sift through mountains of data from GA4 and GSC? Download our free Blog Performance Tracking Dashboard where you can directly track metrics like page views, blog engagement, CTR, and more.
Conversion tracking captures key actions visitors take on your site, like filling out forms, making purchases, or clicking on contact links. These actions reveal where your high-value interactions are happening and which pages and tactics are actually driving engagement.
What’s more, GA4 conversion tracking doesn’t just show you where users are landing, but also how those pages support—or hinder—their journey toward conversion.
Marketers can find top landing pages and track conversion rates on those pages to quickly see where there’s potential to turn more visitors into leads or customers.
Marcie Lord of Digital Dynamo LLC shared their process:
“If you want to use GA4 to improve customer acquisition, you must have conversion tracking set up. This is a non-negotiable. At a minimum, you need to have conversion tags set up that track website engagement that’s most important to your business – examples include form fills, product purchases, and clicks on the phone number.
One of the obvious ways where you can use GA4 data to improve customer acquisition is by examining the top landing pages on your website, and then looking at the conversion rate on those pages for the most important tracked engagements. If the top landing pages have a very low conversion rate, examine them to make sure: – do they have a clear call to action? – is the content designed to answer user questions? – is the content easy to read, or does it make the user read too much? – do all the elements on the page work, or is functionality broken?
Adding more prominent, easy to access calls to action has been one way we’ve improved conversions for top landing pages. Instead of burying the conversion opportunity, we make it the first thing users see when they hit the page. This tactic has doubled conversion rates for many of our clients.”
Disconnect between user intent and page content leads to high bounce rates and missed conversion opportunities.
You need to examine which search terms bring visitors to specific landing pages, so you can properly assess whether the page content aligns with the user’s expectations.
If users frequently bounce from a particular page, it could be a signal that the content doesn’t address what they’re looking for.
Avinash Chandra of BrandLoom Consulting shared how their team helped a client with this issue:
“For one e-commerce client, I noticed users landing from specific branded searches were bouncing right off. Why? The landing pages weren’t aligned with the searcher’s intent. We made a quick fix—optimizing the landing pages to match user expectations. The bounce rate dropped by 15%, and average session duration increased by 22%.”
PRO TIP: Are you running Google Ads and want to stay on top of your landing page performance, but struggle with their confusing reports? Here’s a Google Ads Dashboard Template where you can monitor key performance indicators like impressions, CPM, conversions, CPL, and more.
For marketers, GA4’s advanced AI metrics provide a whole new way to connect with customers at just the right moment.
Google Analytics can now analyze past behavior to predict whether someone is likely to buy or might drop off, so companies can prioritize those who may be ready to make a decision.
Khunshan Ahmad of EvolveDash says that his team “uses this data to target the customers who are likely to purchase in the next few days based on past behavior.”
Tracking KPIs with GA4 and GSC is one of the best ways to see how visitors arrive on your site and what they do once they get there.
You can get KPIs that provide a snapshot of site health and traffic sources—such as increases in direct or organic traffic—and how well specific keywords are performing.
For instance, if a blog post or landing page experiences higher-than-average traffic, you can use this data to create more content or social media promotions on similar topics.
Kameshia Ingram of BrandExtract shares their approach to leveraging KPIs:
“At our company, we like to leverage KPIs when looking at the data coming to our site with GA4 and Google Search Console. We like to see where people are coming from.
By looking at this data and presenting it to the client or the team, we might suggest ways we can capitalize on the increase of traffic. We might suggest posting about that particular subject on socials, making sure our SEO tactics align with this strategy.”
During our DBUG session, Craig Hall said that “when you’re talking to CEOs and founders, they start to nod off when you’re talking web metrics…they want to know how it ties to revenue.”
PRO TIP: If you use HubSpot alongside Google Analytics 4, then you already know how time-consuming and tedious it can be to extract insights from the tools. But there’s an easier way to do it with our free Marketing Overview Dashboard Template (HubSpot & Google Analytics 4). Connect your most important insights from these two tools into one dashboard for actionable insights at your fingertips.
These two tools also open up opportunities to refine your content strategy based on actual search behaviors and traffic patterns.
You can combine GA4’s page traffic insights with Search Console’s search query data, to identify keyword gaps and understand which terms have untapped potential to bring more visitors to their site.
One tactic is to focus on non-branded keywords that may have high search volume but aren’t yet driving significant traffic. These keywords often represent topics or questions that prospective customers are searching for, but where the site lacks sufficient or optimized content.
Lindsay Moura of SilverTech shared her strategy:
“One specific instance where the integration of GA4 and Google Search Console made a notable impact was when we analyzed GA4 page traffic data alongside Search Console search query data, we identified key opportunities to optimize their content strategy. We focused on non-branded search queries that were driving little to no traffic but had decent volume potential.
This led us to uncover a list of relevant keywords that were underutilized on their site. By creating new blog posts and optimizing existing content around these keywords, we significantly increased their organic search visibility and traffic to their website.”
Neil Shapiro, another expert from the DBUG session, advised that:
“You cannot analyze every single page. You must analyze groups. You should find groups based on some conditions, namely events, financial metrics, if available, and traffic, to define how to split these pages into groups.”
Neil Shapiro
So, what’s next for our respondents?
Based on their insights, here’s a look at how they plan to continue using these two tools in the future to further optimize their campaigns:
Focusing on the pages that truly impact sales can make all the difference between hitting your business goals and chasing vanity metrics.
One tactic that can be effective is to integrate GSC with Screaming Frog to zoom in on specific, high-impact web pages rather than looking at traffic in broad strokes. You get a granular view of page performance, so you can see how changes in traffic influence client outcomes.
Marketers can avoid the common pitfalls of aggregate traffic analysis, which often leads to knee-jerk reactions or unnecessary optimizations that don’t support the objectives.
Matt Edens of Knowmad Digital Marketing is one of our respondents who talked about this approach:
“Integrating GSC with Screaming Frog has been one of the most beneficial strategies we’ve used to optimize digital marketing campaigns for sales growth. This integration allows us to stay laser-focused on work on web pages that drive impact on client sites, helping businesses achieve targeted outcomes.
Prior to implementing this strategy, traffic was viewed through more of an aggregate lens, which can lead to erroneous insights and assumptions, broad or over-implementation efforts, and/or work that simply doesn’t help the client’s business. By keeping the data specific and granular, we know when shifting traffic behavior is truly a concern and when it’s an opportunity. This has been a huge aid in achieving exceptional organic search outcomes for our clients that go beyond simple vanity metrics.”
PRO TIP: Want an easier way to track which of your pages perform well and which search queries drive traffic to your website (among other things)? You can use our free Google Search Console Queries and Page Overview Dashboard Template to get your GSC data into a single dashboard for streamlined analysis.
With tools like purchase and churn probability, you can use GA4’s predictive metrics to pinpoint which users are most likely to convert and focus on those high-value segments.
To get started, set up predictive audiences in GA4 to zero in on people likely to take actions like making a purchase or interacting with your campaign.
You can use this data to personalize messaging, offers, or content for these users. For instance, if a certain group has a high chance of buying, you could offer them a limited-time discount or a special product recommendation.
Gary Hemming of ABC Finance says that “for future campaigns, I plan to leverage GA4’s predictive metrics to tailor content based on specific audience interests. With this data, we’ll segment campaigns to create personalized follow-up interactions that strengthen engagement and drive higher conversion rates.”
Khunshan Ahmad of EvolveDash also talked about how they plan to use “revenue prediction feature of GA4 to help us get better at inventory management. This data will be useful in identifying peak customer engagement. Therefore, we will be able to increase the stock when customers are likely to increase their shopping habits. Similarly, we can either cut down on stock or create custom funnels when the activity is low.”
Marketers can use the AI feature to analyze search queries and find the different ways people phrase similar searches. You can then build topic clusters based on this data to cover a central subject more comprehensively.
With AI-driven query analysis, marketers can see more than just individual keywords to map out the broader context of user intent.
Phil Wiseman of Analytics That Profit shares how they “use AI to analyze search queries to explore different ways people search for the same information. This approach allows you to build topic cluster easily.”
To understand how users engage with blog content, you need to track more than just page views.
In GA4, scroll depth tracking offers a great way to measure how far users are scrolling through an article, so you can see which sections hold attention and where readers might drop off.
Using Google Looker Studio to visualize Google Search Console data can take this analysis further.
Looker Studio dashboards help marketers represent GSC data in a clear, visually engaging format, so it’s easier to spot trends and analyze performance across different pages and keywords.
Ruslan Konygin of Triodox explains that for “blog content analysis, you can configure GA4 to track scroll depth—analyzing how deeply (in percentage) users are scrolling through each article, how many read the article to the end, and how many click the link to the contact page. For Google Search Console, I recommend using dashboards in Google Looker Studio to better represent Search Console data.”
Are you crafting content that fits language preferences?
This is one tactic that some of our respondents plan to use to connect with new audience segments and strengthen their presence in different markets.
To make this work, content and marketing teams need to team up. Content teams can focus on creating high-quality blog posts in the chosen languages, while marketing can increase the reach by promoting it on social media channels tailored to each language group.
This way, language-specific content doesn’t just match search trends—it also finds the right audience on the platforms they use most.
Simon Bacher of Ling says that “if we see a trend in search intent for specific languages, our content team will produce more blog content on that topic and our marketing team will promote these languages across socials.”
Colton De Vos of Resolute Technology Solution also talked about this tactic:
“By regularly reviewing Google Search Console data for which search terms are driving traffic and cross-comparing that against geographic traffic, our team has been able to tweak how certain pages rank in countries.
We were able to identify several pages that were driving lots of international web traffic but few local leads and take measures to rank these pages better locally – Google Maps insertions, more local backlinks, and aligning keyword focus to what terms people are using in our area.”
GA4’s event-based tracking gives marketers deep insights into what users are doing—product views, form submissions, and cart abandonment.
If you monitor these interactions, you can group audiences based on specific actions and use the data to create more relevant Meta Ads campaigns.
For example, users who leave items in their cart could see retargeting ads with a discount to nudge them to finish their purchase.
Ronald Dsouza of Fit You Today went into detail on this tactic and shared his specific plan:
“I’m leveraging GA4 to drive customer acquisition through Meta Ads. I’ve set up event-based tracking in GA4 to monitor key actions on my website, like product views and form submissions. This data helps me create custom audiences based on user behavior, which I then use for targeted retargeting campaigns on Meta Ads.
I also use GA4’s insights to build lookalike audiences, targeting potential new customers who share characteristics with my most valuable existing customers. This has helped me increase my reach while maintaining relevance, leading to better conversion rates.”
PRO TIP: Do you run ads on Facebook and have trouble making sense of their confusing reporting interface? Use our free Facebook Ads Campaign Performance Dashboard Template instead, where you can connect your data in one easy-to-understand dashboard. Track everything from amount spend to conversion rates by creative in one comprehensive screen.
Turning your website into a customer acquisition powerhouse starts with understanding what drives engagement—and what doesn’t.
Sure, it’s easy to gather traffic numbers, bounce rates, and session times, but without context, those metrics don’t reveal much about how effectively you’re attracting potential customers.
This is where Databox comes in to make more sense of your GA4 and GSC data.
Our Benchmark Groups give you direct insight into how other businesses are performing on similar metrics, so you can see where you’re ahead, where there’s room to improve, and what’s working best for others in your industry. You’ll get real-time insights into whether your organic traffic is on par with industry leaders.
And it doesn’t stop there. There’s also Databox Dashboards, where you can bring all of your essential GA4 and GSC data together in one place, making it easy to track, visualize, and act on it.
From acquisition metrics like traffic sources and click-through rates to deeper insights into user behavior, every detail is right at your fingertips.
You can quickly connect your data sources (we support 100+ integrations), select key metrics, and generate visual reports that make the data actionable.
Plus, by linking your Benchmark Group data directly to your dashboards, you gain a real-time comparison view without any extra setup—you can identify patterns, spot gaps, and refine your strategies with precision.
Sign up for a free Databox trial today and start making more sense of your GA4 and GSC data – without any complex setups, spreadsheet headaches, and manual reporting.
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Filip Stojanovic is a content writer who studies Business and Political Sciences. Also, I am a huge tennis enthusiast. Although my dream is to win a Grand Slam, working as a content writer is also interesting.
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