Google Analytics is key to understanding the traffic trends of your website. In this article we'll cover specific reports on Users, Demographics, Engagement and Acquisition.
One key reason to understand and review your traffic data is to understand who your audience is as compared to who you had been targeting.
A great feature of Google Analytics is the ability to compare data by adding additional dimensions. An intersection of detail can really help with running advertising campaigns. For example, open the User Attributes Overview report and add the comparison of Age (all available age ranges). This data helps identify common age demographics by geography. If you want to run a targeted advertising campaign you can then do so by selecting Age and Location (Geography).
Imagine your strategy is to increase the duration of engagement; by visiting the home report you can click on "average engagement time" and drill into the days which had the highest engagement and the content that people are most engaged in. This tells you that people/visitors are receptive to that content (which means you should try to create more specific content that relates to it).
In conclusion, GA4 has some great standardized reports - the insights feature is useful - but the power comes with doing dimensional comparisons. In an upcoming article, we'll run an advertising campaign and review our GA data to optimize the daily spend.