What if you could look at your website’s data and immediately see what’s driving bookings, where visitors are dropping off, and how to get more customers to take action? That’s the promise of Google Analytics 4 (GA4)—if you know how to make it work for you.
For many tour and activity operators, GA4 can feel like a maze of numbers and charts with no clear starting point. But it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With a few smart tweaks, you can unlock insights that show you exactly what’s working and where you can improve.
Ready to make your data work harder for you? Here’s how to turn your GA4 data into a growth engine for your business.
What you can track in GA4?
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers a wide range of metrics to help you understand your website’s performance. Some of the top GA4 metrics to monitor include:
- Total users: the number of unique visitors to your site within a specific time frame.
- New users: visitors coming to your website for the first time.
- Active users: users who actively engage with your site or app, such as by starting an engaged session.
- Pageviews: the total number of times pages on your website have been viewed.
- Sessions: periods of active user engagement on your site, starting when they arrive and ending when they leave or after 30 minutes of inactivity.
- Sessions per user: the average number of sessions each user has, giving insights into engagement and loyalty.
- Acquisition source: where your visitors come from, such as social media, organic search, or direct traffic.
- Engagement rate: the percentage of sessions that qualify as engaged, meaning they last at least 10 seconds, include a conversion, or result in two or more page views.
- Average engagement time: the average time users spend actively engaging with your website.
- Bounce rate: the percentage of sessions where users leave your site without any meaningful interaction.
- Conversions: the number of times users complete desired actions, such as making a booking or subscribing to your newsletter.
Tracking these metrics helps you better understand user behavior, evaluate your marketing efforts, and make informed decisions to grow your business.
How to set up GA4 in Xola
Setting up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracking in Xola can help you gain deeper insights into which sales and marketing activities work best and how your website drives bookings and revenue. This means you can track GA4 metrics such as user activity, revenue, and booking performance, all tailored to your tours or attractions.
This integration also supports conversion tracking, so you can measure how effectively your website turns visitors into paying customers. Plus, GA4 uses advanced client-side tracking, ensuring you capture more accurate data about user behavior across different devices and sessions.
Pro Tip: Looking for step-by-step instructions? Check out our detailed Help Center article here.
Additional best practices for interpreting your GA4 data
1. Ensure the Quality of Your Google Analytics Data
The most meaningful insights a tour or activity provider can get from Google Analytics have to do with bookings and revenue. So, the best thing you can do to ensure the quality of your Google Analytics data is to make sure that you are sharing your online booking and revenue data with your Google Analytics account. This typically requires that you set up and enable GA4 conversion tracking on your Google Analytics account and add the code to your website pages.
At Xola, we know how important this is, so we made the setup process easier. This integration adds revenue information to your Google Analytics account, enabling you to see precisely how effective your site is at converting visitors into paying customers.
With Xola’s GA4 integration, you can easily access and analyze revenue by reservation, channel, and all the way down to tours booked or items purchased. For instance, you can see which paid ads convert best, which marketing emails drive the most bookings, or which social media posts get the most referral traffic. This enables you to make informed, data-driven decisions that move your business forward.
Once you have all of your crucial information in Google Analytics, you’ll have an unfiltered view that includes website traffic generated by your staff, bots, spiders, and other sources. Some of this data may cloud your view of the traffic that matters the most. So, creating a filtered view is the next best thing you can do to ensure the quality of your Google Analytics data. There are several types of filters you can consider using, including:
- Exclude internal traffic – You can filter out all traffic coming from your business’s IP address so that your internal web traffic won’t distort your analytics reports. This is especially important if your employees use your website a lot.
- Exclude known bots and spiders – Go into Google Analytics and click “Admin,” then “View Settings.” Scroll down and check the box that says, “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.” This way, search crawlers and other automated web visiting tools will not impact your analytics.
- Learn to identify and block new bots and spiders – New bots and spiders can infiltrate your Google Analytics any day. To get the skills to deal with it yourself, read this in-depth guide to removing referrer spam.
With ecommerce data in your Google Analytics account and the traffic from staff, bots, and spiders out of your filtered view, you’ll be ready to get some solid insights.
2. Define the Questions that You Want to Answer
The data you really need from Google Analytics in any given week or month will only be a small fraction of what’s there for you to review. So, you want to define your questions very well and then understand how to use Google Analytics to answer those questions.
To get you started, here are eight revenue-driven questions that you may want to ask and detailed instructions on how to answer them with Google Analytics:
- What is my revenue from online bookings?
- What is my revenue by customer type (veterans, minors, etc.)?
- What is my revenue by type of offering, such as core, add-on, and gift offerings?
- What is my revenue by marketing channel, such as paid search, organic search, social, and direct?
- How much value is driven by each page on my website?
- What percentage of visits to my site result in a booking?
- What is my conversion rate by marketing channel?
- What is my conversion rate by landing page?
If you have additional questions that you want to ask, do some research to find out how they can be answered with Google Analytics. You’ll be able to answer some questions with reports that come out of the box. For other questions, you may need to do something a little more advanced, like build new segments in Google Analytics.
3. Set Up a Dashboard
A dashboard makes it easy for you to quickly review, on a regular basis, the data from Google Analytics that answers your most pressing questions. To set up a dashboard, you can create one in Google Analytics, or you can create one yourself in Excel or Google Sheets.
4. Avoid analysis paralysis
With Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you have access to a staggering amount of data—but too much data can be overwhelming. Trying to interpret everything at once may lead to analysis paralysis, where you spend so much time sifting through metrics that you struggle to take meaningful action.
That’s why it is critical to focus on the metrics that matter the most to your business.
Start by identifying your business goals. For example, if your primary objective is to increase direct bookings, concentrate on metrics like conversion rates by landing page or revenue by marketing channel. Avoid getting sidetracked by less critical data points like average session duration unless they directly tie back to your goals.
You can still look at other metrics, like bounce rates, demographics, or average session duration, but by choosing the metrics that matter the most, you avoid spending hours each week reviewing dashboards and reports but struggle to decide where to focus your marketing efforts.
By narrowing their analysis to the conversion rate of their most visited landing pages and the revenue generated by each marketing channel, you quickly realize which channels or campaigns are driving the best results. These insights allow you to reallocate their budget to maximize results.
Remember, it’s better to act on a few meaningful insights than to drown in irrelevant data. By focusing on what matters most, you’ll drive smarter, faster decisions for your business.
Key takeaways
Google Analytics 4 gives you the power to make smarter, more informed decisions for your business. By setting up your tracking correctly, focusing on the metrics that matter, and avoiding the trap of analysis paralysis, you can transform raw data into a roadmap for growth.
The key is to start simple: track what drives bookings and revenue, ask the right questions, and use dashboards to stay focused. With these steps, you’ll be equipped to not just understand your data but to use it to grow your tours and activities like never before. Ready to dive deeper? Explore more resources below or request your free demo.