The Metrics That Actually Matter in GA4 (And the Ones That Don’t)

You’ve got GA4 set up. You’re looking at the dashboard. And there are about 50 metrics staring at you.

Page views. Sessions. Users. Bounce rate. Engagement rate. Average session duration. And then a bunch of ecommerce-specific metrics that may or may not be configured correctly.

Most of these metrics are noise. They make you feel like you’re paying attention but they don’t tell you if your store is actually making money.

Here’s what you should actually track and why everything else is distraction.

The Metrics That Matter

1. Conversion Rate by Traffic Source

This is the most important metric. Period.

Not your overall conversion rate. Your conversion rate broken down by where traffic comes from.

Here’s why: you might have a 2% overall conversion rate. Sounds okay. But if you dig deeper:

• Organic search converts at 3.5%
• Google Ads converts at 2.1%
• Meta Ads converts at 0.8%

Now you can see the actual story. Organic is your moneymaker. Google Ads is breaking even. Meta Ads is a waste of budget.

How to track it: In GA4, go to Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. Look at the Conversion Rate column. Segment by source/medium.

2. Average Order Value (AOV) by Source

Same principle. Not everyone who buys is worth the same.

Someone from organic search might spend $65 per order. Someone from a paid Facebook ad might spend $42. Your email list might spend $78.

If you’re spending money on a channel that brings low-AOV customers, you need to know.

How to track it: Create a custom metric in GA4. Go to Admin > Custom Definitions > Metric. Create “Average Purchase Value” = total revenue / purchase count.

Then segment by source. You’ll see exactly which channels bring your best customers.

3. Cart Abandonment Rate

People add things to cart but don’t buy. This is pure friction.

If 40% of people abandon their cart, something’s wrong with checkout. If 20% abandon, that’s normal.

But this metric only matters if you know why people are leaving. Are they seeing shipping costs and bouncing? Is checkout taking too long? Are they just browsing?

How to track it: In GA4, you need to set up a “Begin Checkout” event. Compare that to your “Purchase” event.

Abandonment rate = 1 – (purchases / begin checkout)

4. Repeat Purchase Rate

New customers are expensive to acquire. Repeat customers are where the profit is.

If you’re getting new customers but nobody comes back, you have a product or customer service problem.

If repeat purchase rate is over 20%, you’re doing something right.

How to track it: In GA4, go to Retention > Repeat Purchase Rate. This dashboard shows you what percentage of customers came back and bought again.

5. Revenue Per User

Not all users are equal. Some spend nothing. Some are your whales.

Revenue per user = total revenue / number of users

If this number is going up month-over-month, you’re improving. If it’s flat or down, something’s wrong.

This is one of the most important health metrics for your store.

How to track it: GA4 shows this automatically. Go to Monetization > Conversion and Revenue. Look at the Revenue Per User column.

6. Cost Per Acquisition (If You’re Running Ads)

This is simple: how much are you spending to acquire a customer?

If your average order value is $60 and your cost per acquisition is $25, you’re making $35 per customer. That’s good.

If your CPA is $55, you’re barely breaking even.

You need to know this number.

How to track it: You need to connect your ads account (Google Ads, Meta, etc.) to GA4. Go to Admin > Integrations. Connect your ad accounts.

Then go to Acquisition > All Traffic and look at Acquisition Cost.

7. Product Performance

Which products are driving the most revenue? Which ones are just taking up shelf space?

This matters because it tells you what to stock more of and what to phase out.

How to track it: In GA4, go to Monetization > Ecommerce Purchases. Look at “Item name.” You’ll see revenue by product.

Sort by revenue. Your top 5 products probably drive 50%+ of your revenue.

8. Pages That Don’t Convert

You have pages that get traffic but nobody buys from them. These pages might be broken product pages, blog posts that don’t lead anywhere, or pages with bad copy.

You need to know which ones.

How to track it: Create a dashboard view that shows pages by traffic vs. conversions. If a page has 500 views and 0 purchases, something’s wrong with that page.

Fix it or delete it.

The Metrics That Don’t Matter (And Why Everyone Tracks Them)

Bounce Rate

This metric is misleading. A high bounce rate doesn’t mean something’s wrong. It just means people came to one page and left.

If someone lands on a blog post, reads it, and leaves satisfied—GA4 counts that as a bounce. It’s not a problem.

Bounce rate only matters for traffic that should convert. For blog traffic or informational pages, ignore it.

Session Duration

People spend 3 minutes on your site. Is that good or bad? You don’t know without context.

Someone who buys in 30 seconds spent less time than someone who browsed for 5 minutes and left. Which one is better?

Duration matters less than whether they converted. Ignore it.

Pages Per Session

Similar issue. Someone who lands on a product page and buys only visited 1 page. Someone who browsed your entire catalog and didn’t buy visited 10 pages.

Which behavior is better?

The person who bought. So stop obsessing over pages per session.

Overall Traffic Numbers

Your traffic went from 500 users to 600 users. Great. But did you make more money?

If traffic went up 20% but revenue went down, that’s a problem. You’re attracting the wrong people.

Focus on qualified traffic, not total traffic.

Geographic Breakdowns

Unless you’re running location-specific campaigns, you don’t need to know if visitors are from Portland vs. New York.

What you need to know is if they’re buying.

What Your Dashboard Should Actually Look Like

You need one simple dashboard that shows:

1. Revenue (total, by source)

2. Conversion rate (by source)

3. Average order value (by source)

4. Repeat purchase rate

5. Revenue per user

6. Top 5 products (by revenue)

7. Cart abandonment rate

If your dashboard shows these 7 things, you know how your store is actually performing.

Everything else is noise.

What to Stop Tracking

Remove these from your dashboard:

• Bounce rate
• Session duration
• Pages per session
• Overall traffic count (replace with traffic by source instead)
• User count (it’s less important than revenue per user)

They’re not giving you actionable information.

The Simple Audit

Go into your GA4 dashboard right now.

Answer these questions:

1. What’s your overall conversion rate?

2. Which traffic source has the highest conversion rate?

3. What’s your average order value?

4. How much are you spending on ads? (If you’re running them.)

5. What’s your repeat purchase rate?

If you don’t know the answers, that’s a sign your GA4 setup needs work.

Most store owners are tracking the wrong metrics and making decisions based on noise. If you set up GA4 to focus on the metrics that actually matter, you’ll see your store’s real story. It changes how you make decisions. If you want to audit your GA4 setup and make sure you’re tracking what matters, let’s talk.