Why GA4 matters when you already have ad dashboards
The Meta Ads or Google Ads dashboard shows impressions, clicks and spend, but the story stops when someone lands on your website. Whether that person left a request, messaged you on Telegram or closed the tab is something only website analytics can tell you.
There is a second reason. Besides ads, visitors arrive from search, your Instagram profile, links in Telegram channels, and OLX or Uzum listings if you use them. GA4 puts all of these sources into one table, so you can see which ones deliver and which only look busy.
Six terms you actually need
The interface feels complicated mostly because of vocabulary. Six terms cover most of it.
- User: roughly, a unique visitor during the chosen period
- Session: a single visit to the site
- Event: any recorded action, such as a page view, a click or a form submission
- Key event: an action that matters to your business, like a request, a phone tap, a jump to a Telegram bot or a move to Click or Payme checkout
- Dimension: an attribute used to split data, such as channel, page, city or device
- Metric: a number, such as sessions, users or event count
Finding your way around and reading the numbers
The left-hand menu has a few main areas: Home for a summary, Reports for ready-made tables, Explore for custom analysis, Advertising for attribution, and Admin for settings and access. A beginner can live in Reports for a long time and ignore the rest.
Every report is simply a table in which metrics are split by dimensions, for example sessions by channel or key events by page. Once that clicks, almost any screen becomes readable.
Next, pick a date range in the top right corner and switch on comparison, either with the previous period or with the same period last year. A raw monthly visitor count says very little, while “up compared with last month” gives you something to act on. Mind seasonality too: restaurants, travel agencies and clothing shops in Uzbekistan each have their own peaks, so a year-on-year view is often the fairer one.
Three reports to open first
The first is the traffic acquisition report. It tells you where people come from: organic search, paid ads, direct visits, referrals from other sites and social networks. Switch the dimension to source and medium to see specifics, such as individual referring websites.
The second is pages and screens under the engagement section. It shows which pages are viewed most and how long people stay. If your main service is buried at the bottom while an old news post leads the list, your site structure needs attention.
The third is the landing pages report, which lists the pages where visits begin. Filter it to organic search and you can see which pages bring people from Google and what those visitors do afterwards. For SEO, this is the report that matters most.
Key events turn visits into results
If key events are not set up, GA4 only counts visits, and visits do not pay your bills. Mark the actions your site exists for: form submissions, taps on your phone number, clicks into a Telegram bot or chat, and the step to payment.
After setup, submit a test request yourself and confirm the event appears in the events list. From then on, every report gains a results column, and you can compare channels by enquiries rather than traffic. A channel with modest traffic sometimes brings more leads than the biggest one.
What to check in your first week
A short plan that delivers value without a deep dive:
- Open your own site and find yourself in the realtime report to confirm the tracking code works
- Write down the split of sessions by channel as your baseline
- See which landing pages bring the most visitors from search
- Compare phone and desktop behavior and check whether the mobile version is losing people
- Find out on which pages requests are submitted most often
Where to learn next and when to ask for help
One common trap: filters and comparisons stay applied in a report until you remove them. If you narrowed the view to Tashkent yesterday, today’s numbers may look odd. Check the line above the table, which lists everything currently applied, and clear what you do not need.
Google offers free GA4 courses and a demo account with real online-store data, where you can click anything without breaking your own setup. Once the standard reports feel familiar, move on to Explore for custom tables, funnels and segments.
If you have the numbers but not the next step, or you need to connect your website, ads and leads into one picture, that is a strategy question. At markdev we help businesses in Uzbekistan build analytics and a marketing strategy around their real goals. Tell us about your task and we will talk through where to start.
FAQ
Is Google Analytics free?
For most small and medium businesses the free version of GA4 is enough. Paid options are aimed at large projects with heavy data volumes.
What is the difference between a user and a session?
A user is an approximate unique visitor within a period, and a session is one visit by that person. One person can create several sessions in a month.
Should I set up key events right away?
Yes, it is the first thing to do. Without them you see traffic but cannot tell which channels and pages bring leads.
Does GA4 show statistics inside Instagram?
No. GA4 records only the visits that come from Instagram to your site and what people do there. For reach and reactions, use the platform’s own insights.
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