Making GA4 Work for SEO - BrightonSEO Oct 2025

Anna Lewis' slides from her talk at BrightonSEO about Making Google Analytics 4 work for SEO. This includes slides on how to edit the reports library to suit SEO specific metrics, reporting on AI / LLM traffic as it's own channel and audience, reporting from search console and internal search activity plus plenty more!

2. Started out in SEO,
then PPC, then Analytics.
Founder of Polka Dot Data
Analytics Consultancy
15+ years experience
Rebuilt many GA4s!

3. So many ways SEO has
changed

4. Even more ways Analytics
has changed….

5. So let’s focus on what we
CAN do.

6. REPORTS LIBRARY SEARCH CONSOLE
CONVERSIONS
LLM
CHANNELS
AUDITS
LOOKER
EXPLORATIONS

7. AUDIT YOUR
TRACKING

9. Audit Checklist
Settings
•User access – clear out unwanted people
•Property Details – time zone matches business
•Data collection – review signals and user options
•Data retention – set to 14 months
•Session Time out – Check and edit
•Filters – internal traffic / dev traffic
•Domains – for cross domain functionality
•Consent settings – check!
•Scheduled emails – set up insights to get alerts
Data Stream Set Up
•Stream per website entity / app type
•Pageviews – check they only fire ones
•Scrolls – move to GTM to limit/customise
•Outbound clicks – move to GTM and rename
•Site Search – Check this is working
•Form Interactions – move to GTM to track what is relevant
•Video Engagement – check if working, or do manually
•File downloads – check you’re happy with naming convention
Data Display
•Events – click Modify to see if anything has snuck in
•Key events – stick to essentials
•Audiences – use it like segments or for PPC
•Annotations – woohoo! Post cards to your future self
•Comparisons – segments for reports not explorations
•Segments – segments for explorations not reports
•Custom definitions – use these wisely
•Channel Groups – adjust to suit your needs
•Attribution Settings – check this!
•Reporting Identity – Blended if you want more data
•Debug View – Use this to check tracking
Product Links
•Ensure you go through and link all products you use
•Start using Big Query ASAP and add payment details to enable storage
Customisations
•Custom dimensions – use default names where possible but use these for new
information, keep limits in mind, register them here to ensure visible in reports
•Custom metrics – utilise where you might want to count an event or other
numerical information that you want to count up
•Calculated metrics – make your own sums happen in GA4
Reports & Exploration Changes to Make
•Customise your reports using the library – group by dept. or region needs
•Duplicate transaction report
•Channel | Source | Medium | Landing report
•Custom funnel reports – have fun with these! They’re insightful
•Item name and checkout step data – is it working properly
•Report on pages with title including 404 to monitor error pages
•Channel data – how much unassigned or not set do you have? Why?
•Have you got referral traffic from internal or payment gateways?
•Report for Personally Identifiable Information – to ensure you’re not tracking it!
Delete any.

10. TRACK
CONVERSIONS

11. Conversion Tracking - Purchase

12. Conversion Tracking – Key Events

13. Landing pages by key event

14. REPORT
CUSTOMISATIONS

15. Special/unique
Customise
everything!!
-Metrics
-Dimensions
-Menu

16. ACTIONS Group Reports by dept/ region
Add, Remove + Re-order Metrics
Name everything clearly
Re-organise reports

19. SEO Report

20. Special/unique

21. Build Your Own Reports
Library
•Create new
report
Blank or
Template
•Choose your
base
Build
•Dimensions
•Metrics
•Filters!

23. Pages – inc. 404 tracking

24. Pages – inc. 404 tracking

25. Create Explore
Reports for 404s

26. Explorations
•404s
•Search engines
•Organic Landing pages
•Content Groupings
•Organic traffic by page type
•Organic traffic by product category
•Custom Funnels

27. Combine Data in Looker
•Rankings
•SEO Tools
•Forecasts
•Targets
•Search Console
•Offline Data

28. GET YOUR
CHANNELS
WORKING

29. UTM’s Are Parameters:

30. UTM Tracking Parameters
Type Information url code to use
Required
Medium utm_medium
Source utm_source
Campaign utm_campaign
Optional
Term utm_term
Content utm_content

31. 3 Essential UTM’s
Required
•utm_source– The traffic source/platform where the link is posted, e.g.
facebook, instagram, twitter, etc.
•utm_medium– The type of marketing used, e.g. cpc, paid, paid-social,
organic-social, affiliate, aggregate-site, email etc.
•utm_campaign– Used to label the campaign, sometimes the keyword
used in a paid ads campaign or even the segment of the audience that
you are targeting e.g. revival-remarketing-2025, facebook-profile, twitter-
profile etc.

32. 2 Optional UTMs
Optional
•utm_term– Often used in paid search campaigns to label the
particular keyword that you were bidding on for that specific
ad.
•utm_content– This can be used for labelling in split testing to
differentiate between type A and type B.

33. When to use UTMs?
•Google Business Profile
•PR content
•Social posts
•All ads
•Social sharing links

34. TRACKING
LLMs / AI

35. Unassigned Channel Editing:
Better:Not great:

36. Check causes of (not set)
Re-categorise Channels
Fix broken UTM tags

38. Edit Channels

39. New AI Channel
.*(
chatgpt\.com
|claude\.ai
|chat\.deepseek\.com
|perplexity(\.ai)?
|gemini\.google\.com
|copilot\.(microsoft\.com|cloud\.Micro
soft)
|grok\.com
|openai.com
|writesonic.com
|(copy\.ai)
|deepseek\.com
|huggingface
|bard\.google
).*
REGEX TIPS
| Or
.* Anything or nothing
\ Turns regex character into normal
(ab) Phrase group
[1-9] Range
^ Starts with

40. AI Audience

41. ATTRIBUTION

42. NOT ALL
ATTRIBUTION
METHODS
ARE CREATED
EQUAL

45. Multiple Attribution Scopes
User Session Event
Who first
acquired
this user?
Who sent
this
session?
Who
influenced
this key
event?
Thanks for the slides Alice Crawley (Google)

46. INTERNAL
SEARCH
TRACKING

47. USE FOR:
Keyword Mining
Navigation and UX Improvements
Track Click through Rates

48. Search Term Dimensions

49. Using GTM?
•Rewrite to Lowercase
•Data Layer push
•Query
•Link text
•Page navigated to
•Result position

50. SEARCH
CONSOLE

51. ACTION
Link Search Console to GA
Ensure Big Query Set Up for GSC
Utilise GCS in GA + BQ

52. REPORTS LIBRARY SEARCH CONSOLE
CONVERSIONS
LLM
CHANNELS
AUDITS
LOOKER
EXPLORATIONS

53. Need help
with GA4?
I’m here:
[email protected]
LinkedIn
Book a project
consultation