The key to local SEO data is in its name – it’s local. Without it, a campaign may not receive crucial insights to adjust its central strategy. If you’re targeting **Manhattan, N.Y.**, but 80% of your users are visiting from devices in **Brooklyn, N.Y.**, you’re missing something. But how do you find these gaps in **Google Analytics 4**? Insights previously accessed through Universal Analytics are scattered across several dashboards in GA4, with new processes on the platform for filtering and accessing local data. Additionally, certain settings and configurations must be enabled to ensure local data collection.
A local SEO practitioner should regularly analyze information about organic user locations, behaviors, and landing pages accessed from search results. Through these key reports in GA4, we can review organic data that reflects key local behaviors:
1. Demographic details
2. Traffic acquisition and user acquisition
However, none of these reports are perfect. Each report poses flaws and challenges that complicate our data. I’ll include troubleshooting tips and context for each report to ensure the data analysis is as helpful as possible.
1. Demographic details
Where to find the data in GA4: Reports > User > User Attributes > Demographic Details
By default, this report lists where users visited by country, but we can change this by selecting the dropdown next to Country, and changing it to Region or City. From there, we can see the top cities by user:
Why the demographic details report is useful
The demographic details report conveys the region or city where a user accessed the website. We can compare this user location data with location page traffic or proximity-based rankings in a geo matrix tracking tool. In the screenshot above, we see that the top cities visited by users in the United States are also some of the most populous: New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. We should make sure that local landing pages are set up for these locations, as well as key suburbs near these locations.
Issues with the demographic details report
With the right configuration, employee IP addresses will be excluded from GA4 reports, and their cities won’t appear on this dashboard. However, if employees are required to use a VPN for work, it may prove trickier for the demographic details report to remain accurate. A VPN could anonymize employee data from cities worldwide, scattering location-based attribution.
Additionally, certain settings within GA4 must be configured to ensure that the tracking platform is collecting details about a user’s location. To confirm that user location information is being tracked, visit Admin > Data Settings > Data Collection and ensure that Granular location and device data collection toggle is checked.
As previously noted, the Demographic details report will apply sampling, which means it won’t provide an exact count of users from each location. Sometimes, these reports may include a row that says (not set), which typically happens because Analytics doesn’t classify the first event on the page as page_view. An event like user_engagement might trigger prior to page_view, which isn’t supposed to happen but might relate to rendering issues on the website. Overall, the solution to analyzing (not set) will require time to either configure a custom landing page report or adjust the website’s rendering issues. These tasks are often high effort and low impact for local SEO unless there are large data discrepancies – i.e., 50% of the reported traffic is (not set).
2. Traffic acquisition and user acquisition
Where to find this data in GA4: There are two types of labeling for this dashboard, depending on whether GA4 was set up before or after April/May 2023:
Before April-May 2023
Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition > User acquisition
Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition
After April-May 2023
Reports > Business objectives > Generate leads > User acquisition
Reports > Business objectives > Generate leads > Traffic acquisition
The Traffic acquisition and User acquisition dashboards both report on the types of marketing channels that drove traffic to the website: organic, paid, social, etc. However, GA4 has split them into separate dashboards due to a difference in data collection:
User acquisition: Only attributes the first visit from a user.
Traffic acquisition: Multiple sessions of traffic from the same user.
So, traffic acquisition will include a paid session for a user who clicked an ad one day and counts an organic session for that same user the next day. User acquisition would attribute the user only to the paid traffic channel because it drove the first visit to the site.
Determining whether we should monitor user or traffic acquisition in local SEO depends on our goals for the campaign. If we want to know about any time a user visited the site from organic search results, then traffic acquisition is a better fit. However, session-based data becomes complicated with brand and non-brand traffic. If people find “Tom’s Dental,” as an ad and then visit the site, then they might remember this local business. A few days later, they type “Tom’s Dental,” into search results and click an organic result. If a volume of users are selecting organic results with a branded search, this may result in an artificial increase in sessions on the Traffic acquisition dashboard. In these scenarios, relying on the User acquisition dashboard to assess our local SEO growth might be more accurate.
Why the user acquisition and traffic acquisition reports are useful
These dashboards closely resemble the Channels report in Universal Analytics and are a great starting point for determining whether local organic traffic has improved. In local SEO, data within these dashboards can provide insight around:
- UTM parameters from Google Business Profile.
- Filtering to our location page paths to assess organic traffic.
For simplicity, examples will be from the User acquisition report, but the same filters and adjustments can also be applied to the Traffic acquisition dashboard.
UTM parameters
UTM parameters are added to the end of a business URL in the Website field on Google Business Profile. For example: https://example.com/loveland/?utm_source=GMB&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=oh-_loveland_gmb_profile From these UTM parameters, we can assess the success of our GBP profiles with GA4. Use the dropdown on the User acquisition dashboard to update our dimension from “First user default channel group” to “First user source/medium.”
Overall, utilizing the demographic details, traffic acquisition, and user acquisition reports in GA4 can provide valuable insights into local SEO performance. By analyzing this data and making necessary adjustments, businesses can effectively optimize their local SEO strategies and improve overall organic traffic and user engagement.
If you need assistance with your local SEO strategy, Bridgewell Marketing offers professional SEO services. Contact us today at https://bridgewellmarketing.com to learn more.
