How much do you know about the users visiting your website?
Do you know what devices they typically use to visit it, where users are located geographically, or what pages users visit most frequently?
Learning even the smallest amount about who is using your website and how they are using it helps you to understand where to focus your improvements on; and by doing so, you can achieve a better user experience results in a higher conversion rate for sales or sign-ups.
Just knowing something as simple as the device type that is most commonly used to visit your website helps you to focus on improving it for a specific screen size. This is much easier than having to waste time having to adjust all your pages for every single device that exists.
If you don't know the data from your website, then you can't say whether it's working or not. Let's learn more about your users and how they are using your website through setting up analytics.
Google Analytics is the first stop when you know you want to start to analyse how your website is working for you. It gives you an insanely detailed picture of almost everything you might want to know about your website, including:
- Where your users are located
- What time users visit your website
- What devices your users use to visit your website
- How many users you've had visiting your website
- Where users find your website
- How long users spend on your website
- What pages users visit the most
- How well you retain users
The list keeps going on. Installing it with your Webflow website only takes a couple of minutes, and then you can start going through your data and understanding your users.
Note: this guide covers Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The older Universal Analytics, with its "UA-" tracking IDs, was shut down by Google in 2023, so GA4 is what you'll be setting up today.
Setting up Google Analytics 4 on Webflow
First set up a Google Analytics account and a GA4 property for your website. Then find your Measurement ID, which is formatted like G-ABC123XYZ9. You'll find it in the Admin area under your web data stream.
Next, go into the settings of the Webflow project you want to add analytics to and open the Google Analytics integration (in your site settings, under integrations). Add your Measurement ID, save, and re-publish your website.
That's it! Now you want to wait a couple of weeks for it to gather enough data about your website, and then you can jump in and start getting insights.
GA4 also surfaces automated insights that highlight notable changes, but often they can be too technical and don’t tell you what that information actually means. It can often be better to make insights yourself from the trends you see in the data.
Some of the insights you might find could be:
- Your bounce rate is low on your homepage (people only visit your homepage and then leave)
- Users primarily browse your website on mobile devices
- The majority of users visiting your site are situated in a different country to you
- You get most of your referrals from a certain website, such as Medium
- Your website is visited more on the weekend
With each insight you find, you want to come up with a hypothesis about why this might be, and then decide whether to act on this information in some way.
For example if you see you get most of your referrals from a specific website, you could improve or update your profile on that website to maximise your referrals from that channel.
Because there can sometimes be an overwhelming amount of content to work through, here are some specific reports I would recommend looking at. Google rearranges the GA4 menus from time to time, so if you can't find a report, use the search bar at the top of Google Analytics.
Traffic acquisition (source / medium)
Under Reports → Acquisition, you can see what websites and channels your users are coming from. Like I mentioned before, this can be a great way to see what websites and channels to put more effort into to get more traffic from them.
Path exploration
GA4 replaced the old Behaviour Flow report with Path exploration, found under Explore. It shows you the flow of pages users commonly go to when navigating around your website, which makes it easy to outline an ideal funnel or user journey by knowing what steps you want to take them through.
Pages and screens
Under Reports → Engagement, this shows you an overview of how many views each of your pages gets, so you can see which pages are visited most frequently and which blog posts are the most popular. You can also see how long people spend on each page.
Country and demographic details
This shows you what country users are located in when they visit your website. It's good to know where it is more popular and to figure out why that is. You want to make sure you're putting effort into marketing only to the countries you want to get customers from.
Summary
As with any analytics integration you add to optimise your website, you want to make sure you set aside the time to go through it and get insights from it. It's no use setting it up if you're never going to look at it again.
Google Analytics is the most universal tool for understanding more about your users, and knowing more about your users will always be beneficial for your business.
Once you're comfortable with the basics, the next step is to track conversions in GA4 so you can see which visitors actually take the actions that matter.
