GA4 for Sellers: The Six Numbers Worth Checking (Ignore the Rest)
Google Analytics 4 was built for analysts, then given to everyone. Open it as a store owner and you're greeted by engagement rates, event counts and enough menus to hide a small city in. The trick isn't learning GA4. It's deciding, in advance, which six numbers you'll look at — and treating everything else as furniture.
1. Sessions — is anyone coming?
Your raw traffic count. On its own it means little (a thousand wrong visitors buy nothing), but its trend is your early-warning system. Traffic sliding three weeks in a row is a problem you want to see in week one, not on the monthly revenue report.
2. Sessions by channel — where are they coming from?
The same total can hide opposite stories: growing search traffic with dying paid traffic is a healthy store spending less; the reverse is a store on an ad-spend IV drip. Check the split under Acquisition → Traffic acquisition. Organic, paid, social, email, direct — you're watching which engines are actually pulling.
3. Conversion rate — does the store convert visits into orders?
Orders divided by sessions. For most small stores this lands somewhere between 1% and 3%; where exactly matters less than whether it moves. Rising means your pages, prices and traffic quality are improving. Falling while traffic grows usually means the new traffic is the wrong traffic — often the fingerprint of a broad, badly-targeted ad campaign.
4. Revenue by channel — which engine makes money?
Traffic that doesn't convert is a cost dressed as a compliment. This report (Monetization, broken down by source) is where UTM discipline pays off: if you tag your campaign links, you can see that email drove $900 from 400 visits while social drove $80 from 2,000 — and reallocate accordingly. Without tags, all of that collapses into an unhelpful "direct."
5. Cart and checkout abandonment — where does money leak?
Of the people who added to cart, how many started checkout? Of those, how many paid? A big drop at the cart step usually means shipping-cost surprise. A big drop inside checkout means friction — forced account creation, missing payment methods, forms that fight back on mobile. This is the highest-leverage number on the list, because the people leaking out were already trying to give you money.
6. Top landing pages — which doors do people enter through?
Sellers obsess over the homepage; buyers mostly enter through product pages, straight from search and ads. Find your top five entry pages and make sure each works as a front door: clear price, shipping info, trust signals, no dead ends. A high-traffic landing page with a high exit rate is a specific, fixable page — not a mystery.
The 15-minute Monday routine
Same six numbers, same order, once a week, compared to the previous week. Write down anything that moved more than ~15% and one sentence on why. That habit — not dashboards, not more data — is what turns analytics into decisions: kill the campaign that spends without revenue, fix the checkout step where money pools, double down on the channel quietly compounding.
GA4 has three hundred other reports. They'll still be there if you ever need them. You probably won't.
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