Getting Visit Counts (GA4)
“How many visits am I getting?” is everyone’s favorite Analytics question. Website optimization experts would tell you that there are better questions you can be asking, but since everyone wants to know, here's how you can find out!
Hover over the left-hand menu bar and click the “Reports” icon (shown at left). You will be taken to the Reports Snapshot, and a new menu will appear at the left.
Inside this left-hand menu, go to Life Cycle > Engagement > Pages and screens.
The default report for that section is “Pages and screens: Page title and screen class”, which is shown in the screenshot at right.
In this report, I have chosen a date range of Dec 7 - Jan 3. Google Analytics defaults to a 1-week view, so the first thing you’ll probably want to do is go to that dropdown and select a larger date range.
Once that’s taken care of, you can start to analyze your data!
The line graph shows the top five pages on your site and how their visit count changed over time.
The bar graph shows the same 5 pages and their total visits for the entire date range selected.
The table shows the same top 5 pages and several metrics related to them, one metric per column. If you’re only interested in page views, you’ll want to focus on the “Views” column.
These metrics are for the site as a whole, so if you are interested in only certain pages, you can narrow down the results by searching for them.
Viewing data for specific pages: Quick Search
The default view shows “Page title” in the first column of the table, but on a site where a lot of pages can have the same title, you can usually get more specific results by looking at the “Page path” instead. Click the header of the first column (indicated by the yellow arrow) to choose a different option. In this example, it already shows “Page path and screen class,” which is what we want.
In the search box (indicated by the red arrow), type a keyword that appears in the page URL of the page that you want to get data on.
In this example, I’ve searched for “undergraduate,” so I’m being shown results for all the pages with “undergraduate” in the URL.
You can search full url as well. Just key in the part after the website domain into search box. For instance, to view ‘https://extension.umd.edu/locations/baltimore-county/snap-ed ', just type '/locations/baltimore-county/snap-ed’
You can only search for one term at a time using this method.
Viewing data for specific pages: Filters
To perform more complex searches, you’ll need to create a custom filter. Go to the top of the screen and click the “Add Filter” button.
The “Build filter” dialog will open at the right side of your screen.
For each thing you want to filter for in the list of pages, add a condition. We want to filter the page path to only include certain pages, so we’ll look for the page path dimension. In this example, I’ve typed path, so that the only option left to choose from is “Page path and screen class.”
Select that, and the next field will appear.
In the “Dimension values” field, type the term you want to filter for. In this example, I used “undergraduate.”
If you click “All values containing ‘undergraduate,' you will get the same results as you got in the last example where we used the search field to show specific pages.
But if you want to get more specific with multiple search terms, see the next step!
You can filter for a list of specific pages by searching for them one by one in the “Dimension values” field.
Simply type part of the URL until the page you want appears in the list, then check the box next to it.
You can then clear the search field, search for another term, and check the box for any additional pages that you want to track.
In the examples at right, we are setting up filters for just the pages “undergraduate/current-students” and “people/graduate-students.”
When you’re done selecting pages, click “OK.”
The Summary will appear below the filters form, showing a list of the pages you want to get data for. When you are ready, click the “Apply” button.
Now the Pages and screens view has updated to only show the pages that interest you. To let you know that you’ve applied a filter, there is a filter icon with the first few words of what the filter does (red arrow). If you want to remove the filter and go back to the previous view, just click the “X” icon.
That’s it! If you want to check the stats for these same pages often, you can bookmark this report in your browser and come back to it whenever you want!