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How To Build A Google Analytics 4 Landing Page Report In Less Than 4 Minutes

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How To Build A Google Analytics 4 Landing Page Report In Less Than 4 Minutes

In Universal Analytics (UA), we used to open Behavior reports > Site Content > Landing Pages.

The UA landing pages report showed us acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics organized by the landing page visitors used to enter the site.

You could get more granular by adding segments, secondary dimensions, and advanced filters.

This data is essential for informing content strategy, prioritizing page optimization, or fine-tuning conversion-rate optimization efforts.

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), a landing page report does not come fresh out of the box – but it is possible, and if you follow the steps in this article, you’ll only have to do it once.

How To Create A Landing Page Report In GA4

Login to your GA4 account.

Open Reports and select Traffic acquisition from the Life cycle Acquisition drop-down menu.

Screenshot from GA4, July 2022

The standard traffic acquisition report dimension is Session default channel grouping.

A dimension is the descriptive attribute of the data. It makes up the rows in your traffic acquisition table and how the data is organized.

Session default channel grouping represents where Google determined your site users came from.

Session default channel groupingScreenshot from GA4, July 2022
If we click the drop-down arrow, we can choose different ways to organize the same info: where users came from.

But, we want to know where they arrived (the landing page) on our site.

A pencil icon in the top-right corner of your screen indicates you can customize your report.

Customize GA4 reportScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

Go ahead and click that pencil icon.

Hooray! You can now customize your GA4 reports to include just what you care about, and nothing you don’t.

GA4 customize report screenScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

Editing the report will not change how data is collected, so don’t worry about breaking anything.

Okay, so the standard dimension options in a GA4 traffic acquisition report are based on traffic’s origin. We want to see which page a user entered through.

Under Report Data, click Dimensions > Add dimension and scroll (in alphabetical order) until you see Landing page.

Click to add Landing page to your list of primary dimensions.

Adding landing page dimension to GA4 traffic acquisition reportScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

If that is all you need and want to do here, click Save to add Landing page as an option in your drop-down menu for dimensions.

But I hope you’ll keep reading and learn how to customize a full landing page report, and lock it as a standard report in your main navigation.

Customizing A GA4 Landing Report

Customizing a GA4 landing page report may be helpful so that it mirrors what you’re most familiar with in Universal Analytics (UA).

Under dimensions, click the three vertical dots to the right of your Landing page dimension and select Set as default.

GA4 landing page set as defaultScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

Save your progress by clicking the blue Apply button in the bottom right-hand corner.

Click “Metrics” to adjust the data shown in the table columns; it’s the same process as editing dimensions.

You can click the X to remove a metric and click Add metric to choose from the list of options.

GA4 landing page report_add a metricScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

Drag and drop the metrics to arrange the order in which your table rows display.

To mimic a UA landing page report, you would choose Sessions, New Users, Engagement Rate, Avg. engagement time, Event count, and Conversions.

Dimensions and metrics are now set.

I don’t particularly care to have a bar chart for this report, so I’m going to click the eye icon to the left of the Bar Chart to hide it from view.

customizing GA4 landing page reportScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

“Summary cards” are shown on the home page to get a “quick snapshot” of how things are doing from standard reports.

If you want to add a snapshot of landing pages to your home page, click to create a new card.

Setting up a summary card is going to be your preference. I like my card preview to show landing page users and event count in a table format.

GA4 customize summary cardScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

Save this report as a NEW REPORT.

Saving as a NEW report is important, because we don’t want to save over the top of our default traffic acquisition report. Instead, we want to create a new report using the traffic acquisition report template.

Excellent, our landing page report is all set.

To make this report easy to retrieve, we can add it to our main navigation, which is what I’ll show you next.

Adding A Landing Page Report To Main Navigation

Click on Reports and look at the bottom of the left menu navigation. You’ll see a folder icon titled Library.

GA4 report library iconScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

All your report collections are organized in the Library folder, where account administrators can customize the presentation of reports.

Click Edit collection under the Collection > Life Cycle.

Editing collection in GA4 libraryScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

Drag your new Landing Page detail report under Acquisition in the left-hand menu. Click Save > Save changes as a current collection.

Drag and drop landing page report in GA4 library collectionScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

You did it!

You created a landing page report in GA4 that you can easily find under Life Cycle > Traffic Acquisition.

GA4 landing page reportScreenshot from GA4, July 2022

Quick GA4 Landing Page Step-By-Step

Quick step-by-step guide for creating a landing page report in GA4:

  • Login to your Google Analytics 4 account.
  • Open the Life Cycle > Traffic Acquisition Report.
  • Click the pencil icon to customize your report.
  • Select Dimensions > Add Dimension > + Landing Page.
  • Click three vertical dots to set Landing Page as default.
  • Choose to keep a bar graph, line chart, or both.
  • Customize metrics to just those you need.
  • Save > Save as a new report.
  • Name your report: “Landing Page: Traffic Acquisition.”
  • Open GA4 report library.
  • Edit Life Cycle Collection.
  • Drag and drop your landing page report under Traffic Acquisition.

Final Thoughts

GA4 reporting does have a learning curve, but you don’t have to fumble around in the dark.

The outline above will create a landing page report in GA4 that you’re familiar with and can easily access.

Are there other GA4 reports you’d like to learn how to create? Let us know on TwitterLinkedIn, or Facebook.

More resources:


Featured Image: BrightSpace/Shutterstock



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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
  • Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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