Understanding how much interest your brand and products generate is essential for making informed marketing decisions, but measuring that interest isn’t always straightforward. Among the many tools available, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) stands out for its flexibility and depth of insight. By leveraging GA4’s Explore feature, you can go beyond surface-level metrics to uncover patterns of engagement that reveal how and where audiences are connecting with your content. In this article, we’ll walk through how I use GA4 to identify and interpret data signals that indicate interest and how these insights can inform smarter, more targeted strategic decisions.
Within GA4, I begin by navigating to the Explore section, where I create custom reports that can be refined, filtered and adjusted over time. Now, there will be some debate around whether to look at Users or Sessions, and personally I prefer the latter as, not only does it give me the scale of user visits, but the scale of the total volume of visits generated by users. That is, to understand the scale of interest, I want to know how many times a page is viewed, not just the number of unique users. The more an individual visits a page, the more interested I assume they are.
Within the Explore reports, I set up my segment, often based on the area of the website I'm analysing, and then proceed to creating multiple tabs to break down the data and view it through different lenses. These typically include:
And in terms of metrics, I will normally for this purpose look at sessions and engagement rates to gain top-level understanding of volumes and stickiness.
Now, depending on your strategy, you will look at the data through different perspectives. What I've been evaluating in recent years is specific product-region levels of interest. I therefore tend to filter for Organic traffic only, to gauge what kind of interest exists that isn't directly generated by advertising or campaigning.
Example visual of global traffic sources.
To determine organic product-region traffic, I hence start to visualise the data by page (or groups of pages) and set the breakdown to show the traffic by country. Collating this data and subsequently interpreting and analysing it can lead to some enlightening realisations about where your organic interest lies, allowing you to make onward strategic decisions. What you might then overlay is the conversion potential of this organic traffic which, again, will inform strategic decisions on where to invest marketing budget.
I also view it the other way around - by country, then setting the breakdown to show pages of interest. This gives me information about the specific products or areas that are most visited by customers in any given country, again providing informative intel for strategic decision-making. Looking at how traffic levels vary over time can provide information on any seasonality, which might differ by regions and cultures, and by product.
However, numeric data in itself doesn't tell the full story. Integrating qualitative insights from other sources - whether it's anecdotal conversations the sales team have had with clients, or intentionally collected intel by means of questionnaires or interviews - helps to build deeper understanding of the data, what might be driving it and its validity (e.g. is it impossible to have received so much traffic from X country, hence indicating potential high VPN usage?).
So, gaining sight of specific product-region combinations can be transformative in helping us to narrow down where to best invest marketing budget, and where perhaps to pull back. Of course this will go hand in hand with higher level strategic intentions. For example, receiving a healthy level of organic interest from a region might result in allocating higher PPC budgets in order to maximise revenue generated from that area. On the flipside, others might conclude that investment is not required due to sufficient organic traffic, and invest more in areas that are currently struggling, or where there is a strategic interest in growth.
To summarise, by combining quantitative insights from GA4 with qualitative feedback from other sources, we can gain a clearer picture of where genuine interest lies and what drives it. Ultimately, leveraging these insights helps turn raw data into actionable strategy, ensuring your brand invests in the areas with the greatest potential ROI.