Read your Traffic and Acquisition Data

Open Sidebar → Measure → Performance and select the Google Analytics tab.

Search Console tells you how people found you. Analytics tells you what they did next.

The Metrics

The tooltip states the definitions: "GA4 property totals. Active users are unique users for the selected range. Engagement rate is engaged sessions divided by sessions."

Engagement Rate is the One to Watch

For content, engagement rate tells you more than sessions do.

Sessions measure whether your titles and rankings are working. Engagement rate measures whether the article was worth arriving at. An article with rising sessions and falling engagement is attracting the wrong readers, or promising something it does not deliver.

That distinction is actionable in a way that a traffic number is not.

Key Events

These are whatever you configured as conversions in GA4: form submissions, sign-ups, purchases, calls.

If this is empty, it is because your GA4 property has no key events defined. NarraSEO reports what Analytics has, so the fix is in GA4.

For anyone writing content to generate business rather than traffic, this is the number that matters, and it is worth the setup in Analytics to have it.

Channel Performance

Channel performance shows active user-days by acquisition channel, and Sessions by channel shows daily sessions across leading channels.

Watching Organic Search over 90 days is the honest measure of whether your content programme is working. Do not read a single week.

Source / Medium

Active user-days and sessions grouped by traffic source and medium. More granular than channels, and where you find which specific referrers matter.

Search source or medium with the box provided.

AI Referral

AI referral shows active user-days from AI assistants and answer engines.

This is newly important. People increasingly research through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews rather than clicking through a results page, and traffic arriving from those sources behaves differently. It tends to be lower in volume and further along in intent.

You can also filter the acquisition view to AI referrals specifically.

Watch this panel over months rather than days. It is a trend worth understanding early, and the absolute numbers are usually small at first.

Filters

Under Refine view: Channel, Source, Medium, and Traffic, with all-traffic options such as "All channels" and the specific AI referrals option.

One Filtering Limitation

Active users are unavailable when you filter. They are a property-level figure, so filtering by channel, source, or medium removes them. You will see "Active users unavailable for this filter" with the suggestion to clear the filters.

Sessions remain available under filters, so use sessions when you need a filtered comparison.

Choosing a Period

30d for spotting change, 90d for trends. 1d and 7d are too noisy for content decisions.

Every range compares against the previous period of equal length.

The One Day Lag

Analytics reports about one day behind, so today's data is incomplete. This is quicker than Search Console's three days, which is why a new article shows up in Analytics before it shows up in search data.

Notes

Some data backfills after you first connect. You may see "Active users still syncing" or "Still backfilling" for a period. Existing totals stay available meanwhile.

Empty cells show a dash rather than a zero.

Sync now pulls the latest data from Google.

Reading the Two Sources Together

The Overview tab exists for this, with Search visibility and Engagement side by side.

The question worth asking is whether the traffic you are winning is the traffic you wanted. Search Console shows you what you are winning, and Analytics shows you whether it was worth winning. An article ranking well with poor engagement is a targeting problem, not a success.

Related

Reading your search performance covers the Search Console side. What the Performance page shows covers the page overall.