How to see your website traffic in Google Analytics (GA4)

To see your website traffic in Google Analytics 4, open Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition, set the date range in the top right corner, and read the sessions per channel. That one report answers “how many visits did we get, and from where”. For “which pages did they land on”, open Reports > Engagement > Landing page, and for “is anyone on the site right now”, open Reports > Realtime.

The rest of this guide shows where each report lives, which metrics count as “traffic” in GA4, and how to compare two periods without fooling yourself.

Before you start: why your menu may look different

GA4 does not show every property the same left menu. The reports are grouped into collections, and which one you get depends on how the property was created (Google’s documentation):

• Life cycle: sections called Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization and Retention. Properties created before March 27, 2023, and properties set up without business information, get this one by default. The menu paths in this guide follow it.
• Business objectives: sections named after goals, such as Generate leads, Drive online sales or Examine user behavior. Traffic acquisition and Landing page sit under Generate leads, Pages and screens under Examine user behavior.

If you can’t find a report, it may simply be hidden. Anyone with the Editor role can add it back from Reports > Library at the bottom of the left menu.

Step 1: Set the date range and turn on comparison

Every standard report uses the date picker in the top right corner. Pick a range, then switch on Compare to put an earlier period next to it (Google’s documentation). Three options matter:

• Previous period (match day of week): the best default for a week or a month. It lines up Mondays with Mondays, which matters for any site whose traffic dips at the weekend.
• Previous period: the span of the same length right before. Fine for long ranges, misleading for short ones when the weekdays don’t line up.
• Previous year: useful for seasonal businesses, as long as the property has a full year of data.

Two habits save a lot of false alarms. Leave out today and yesterday, because GA4 data processing can take 24 to 48 hours (Google’s documentation). And compare full weeks, Monday to Sunday, rather than “last 7 days”, which shifts every morning.

Step 2: Open Traffic acquisition to see total traffic by channel

Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition (Google’s documentation). The top line of the table is your total traffic for the period. Each row below it is a channel from the Session default channel group, such as Direct, Organic Search, Paid Social, Organic Social and Email.

This report is session-scoped: it credits each visit to the channel that started that visit, so a returning visitor who first found you on Google and comes back from a newsletter counts once under Organic Search and once under Email (Google’s documentation). That is what you want when the question is “where did this week’s visits come from”. If you want to know where your new visitors first came from, use User acquisition in the same section instead.

To go one level deeper, open the dropdown above the first column and switch the dimension to Session source / medium. Now “Organic Search” splits into google / organic, bing / organic and so on, and “Referral” shows which sites sent you visitors. If you tag your campaigns with UTM parameters, Session campaign in the same dropdown shows each one.

Step 3: Open Landing page to see where visitors arrive

Go to Reports > Engagement > Landing page (Google’s documentation). Each row is the first page of a session, with its sessions and engagement. For a site where the website is the main channel, this is usually the second most useful view: it tells you whether traffic is coming to the homepage, a product page, or a blog post that happened to rank.

Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens looks similar but counts every page viewed, not only the entry page (Google’s documentation). Use it for “which pages get read the most”, and Landing page for “which pages bring people in”.

Step 4: Use Realtime for right now

Reports > Realtime shows activity from the last 30 minutes: active users per minute, where they came from and which pages they are on (Google’s documentation). It is the right report on a launch day, after sending a newsletter, or to check that tracking still works after a site change. It is the wrong report for judging a week, because thirty minutes tell you nothing about a trend.

Which metrics count as website traffic in GA4?

GA4 offers several numbers that all sound like “traffic”. They measure different things.

Metric	What it counts	Use it for
Users	Active users: people with an engaged session, a first visit, or recorded engagement time	How many people you reached
New users	People visiting for the first time	Whether you are reaching new audiences
Sessions	Visits. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity by default	Overall traffic volume
Engaged sessions	Visits that lasted more than 10 seconds, had a key event, or viewed 2 or more pages	Traffic that showed real interest
Engagement rate	Engaged sessions divided by sessions	Traffic quality, channel by channel
Views	Pages viewed, repeats included	Content consumption, not visitors

Three details from Google’s definitions trip people up:

• “Users” in reports means Active users. GA4 also tracks Total users (everyone who triggered any event), but standard reports show active users under the label “Users” (Google’s documentation). Google counts someone as active when they had an engaged session, or when GA4 recorded a first visit or engagement time for them, so the two numbers differ and should never be mixed in one comparison.
• An engaged session needs only one of three conditions: more than 10 seconds, a key event, or 2 or more page or screen views. The 10-second threshold can be changed in the web stream’s tag settings, under Adjust session timeout (Google’s documentation).
• Bounce rate is the opposite of engagement rate. It is the share of sessions that were not engaged (Google’s documentation), not the share of sessions that sent a single hit, as it was in Universal Analytics.

For a small site, a sensible default is to read sessions for volume and engaged sessions for quality. When sessions jump but engaged sessions don’t, the extra traffic is usually low intent: a viral post, a bot, or a campaign aimed at the wrong audience.

What to do when the numbers look wrong

If traffic falls or spikes for no obvious reason, check the data before the marketing: is the tag still firing, did a consent banner change, is the last day still processing. We wrote an ordered checklist for exactly that in Why did my traffic drop last week?, with the GA4 paths for each check.

If you keep checking the same thing, GA4 can watch it for you. Custom insights send an email when a metric crosses a threshold or behaves unusually, at no cost.

Seeing your traffic without opening GA4

Knowing where the reports are is half the job. The other half is opening them every week, which is exactly the habit that slips when you run the website, the marketing and everything else.

This is the problem we built Dialytics for, so read this with that in mind. Dialytics connects to your GA4 property and posts a short digest in your Slack channel every Monday morning: what moved, the likely reason, and the one thing worth your attention. It also checks your traffic every day against the same weekday over roughly the last 12 weeks and only posts an alert when something is genuinely unusual for that day. To ask a follow-up, mention the bot in the thread.

If you would rather stay free, GA4’s scheduled email or a small script will get the numbers in front of you without the commentary. We compared the options in How to send a GA4 weekly report to Slack.