The 5 Website KPIs to Check Every Month in GA4

Key event (GA4) — what it means

A key event in GA4 is the setting that counts a business-critical action — an inquiry submission, a brochure request — as a conversion in Google Analytics 4. Because GA4 does not count inquiries automatically out of the box, having the manager or the production company configure key events is where effectiveness measurement begins.

Hi, I’m Masato, a Webflow specialist. You have been handed responsibility for the company website, you open GA4, and the screen is so complex you cannot tell what to look at — this article is for you, and it covers only the numbers (KPIs) I actually look at on our own site every month.

✓ In this article

• The 5 numbers a website manager should check every month
• For each one: which screen to open, and how many minutes it takes
• A 30-minute monthly checklist, plus what to verify if a production company runs the site for you

The conclusion first. There are only 5 numbers to check every month, and the whole thing takes 30 minutes. ① impressions and clicks in search ② conversions such as inquiries ③ page speed ④ growth in branded search ⑤ traffic arriving via AI. Everything outside those five, honestly, does not need a monthly look.

First principle | You do not need to watch pageviews every month

This may come as a surprise, but pageviews are not among the five. The reason is simple: more pageviews on their own do not do any work for the business. My blog gets 190,000 views a year, and the number of times a page was displayed does not by itself earn a penny. What matters is: are we being found → is that turning into inquiries → is the experience comfortable. The five numbers are arranged in that order.

① Impressions and clicks in search (Search Console, 5 minutes)

Start with Search Console. It is a free tool that shows how many times your site appeared in Google search and how many times it was clicked, and a site’s health check begins here.

1. Open Search Console and click Performance in the left menu
2. Change the period to the last 3 months
3. Check only whether the lines for Total impressions and Total clicks are trending up or down

What you are reading is the slope, not the absolute value. Higher than last month, or lower. If it has dropped sharply, that is a sign something has happened, and that is the moment to investigate in detail — not before.

② Conversions such as inquiries (GA4 key events, 10 minutes)

This is the most important of the five. A conversion is the moment the site did its job — an inquiry, a brochure request, a tap on the phone number. GA4 measures these as key events.

1. Open GA4 and go to Reports → Engagement → Events
2. Compare the count of the events you designated as key events against last month

One important warning here. GA4 does not count your inquiries unless you configure it to. On our own site I set an event named generate_lead as a key event, so that inquiries can be counted by type — a free consultation versus a brochure download. If your company’s GA4 has no key events at all, ask your production company to set this up before you look at the other four. Without it, none of the other numbers can answer the question “and did that lead to revenue?”

③ Page speed (PageSpeed Insights, 5 minutes)

Page speed is a number that affects both user experience and search evaluation. Measuring it is easy: put your URL into PageSpeed Insights. Look at the Mobile score, because most of your visitors are on phones.

“Our site must be fast” is not reliable. When I measured the very site this article sits on, it scored 73 at first; I removed the web font that was causing it and brought it to 98. You only learn the number by measuring it. As a rule of thumb, 90 or above is fine, and if you stay in the 50s or below it is time to talk to your production company.

④ Growth in branded search (Search Console, 5 minutes)

Branded search means people searching for your company or service by name. This number is the report card for everything you do off the site — sales, referrals, social, flyers. A company people look for by name is steadily accumulating awareness.

1. In Search Console’s Performance report, click + New → Query
2. Enter your company name (including alternate spellings) to filter
3. Compare the impressions trend against last month and against the same month last year

If this is growing, the business is moving forward even when overall traffic is flat. Conversely, if you are pushing hard on ads and social but branded search is not rising, that is a hint to review what you are doing.

⑤ Traffic arriving via AI (GA4, 5 minutes)

A new item as of 2026. An AI such as ChatGPT introduces your site inside an answer, and people arrive from there — that traffic has already started.

1. In GA4, go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition
2. Type chatgpt into the table’s search box to narrow down by source

Here is the honest measurement: even on my blog, which gets 190,000 views a year, traffic via AI runs about 12 sessions a month, almost all of it from ChatGPT. It is still small. I look at it every month anyway, because I want to catch the moment that number starts moving off zero. What we did to grow AI-sourced traffic is written up in full, with measurements, in a separate article.

Number zero: is the measurement itself even alive?

Having introduced five numbers, there is something to check before them: whether the mechanism collecting the numbers is running at all. I write this because I got badly burned here myself.

In July 2026, GA4 on our own site was down entirely for about two weeks. The measurement tag had broken during the rebuild, but the site itself displayed normally and no error screen appeared. Only the measurement had stopped, so nobody could notice unless they went and looked.

What made me notice was nothing but habit. I look at the numbers roughly once a week, and when I opened them after a two-week gap they were at zero, which felt wrong. It had not occurred to me that they could have stopped, so for that whole stretch I was not looking at all, let alone judging whether things were going well. Opening them after two weeks and finding zero was, frankly, quite a disappointment.

What made the incident painful is that measurement data cannot be recovered after the fact. A server fault can be fixed and everything returns; visits that were never recorded stay blank forever. What was happening in July is something we will never know.

So after that experience I put an automated daily check on whether measurement is alive into my own site. Rather than having a human watch more often, it is more reliable to shift to something that tells you when it stops. If doing that in-house is hard, just ask your production company: “can you run a periodic check that the measurement tag is still alive?” That is a perfectly legitimate request within the scope of a monthly maintenance plan.

How to read the 5 website KPIs | A 30-minute monthly checklist for GA4 and Search Console

On the same day each month (the first of the month works well), go through them in this order and leave a single line of record.

For what it is worth, I open them weekly or every other week rather than monthly. That said, I do not look daily. Looking daily is meaningless, in my view. Traffic moves up and down by the day, so celebrating or despairing over a single day never turns into an action. All I want to know is the slope — growing or shrinking — and I think about the next move once I have it. Monthly is enough for some people; others, like me, want a look every two weeks. That part is preference. Just remember that the longer the interval, the later you notice the “number zero” incident above.

1. Search Console: impressions and clicks (5 minutes)
2. GA4: count of key events, i.e. conversions (10 minutes)
3. PageSpeed Insights: the mobile score (5 minutes)
4. Search Console: impressions for branded search (5 minutes)
5. GA4: sessions arriving via AI (5 minutes)

All you record is the five numbers and the date; no elaborate report required. Three months in, the slope becomes visible; six months in, you can check your moves against the results. I review our own measurements this same way, sharing them early through the newsletter (emails are in Japanese).

What I actually do after looking at the numbers

Articles like this tend to end at “go and look”, so here is what I actually do after looking.

① I reversed a decision to throw something away

During the rebuild I judged that our Korean site was unnecessary, redirected all of it to the Japanese version, and effectively shut it down. The pages had been produced with Webflow’s automatic translation, so I had no expectations for them.

Then, looking at Search Console some time later, I noticed that the Korean pages I had supposedly shut down were still getting clicks. Not many, but not zero. Seeing that, I decided throwing them away would be a waste, rebuilt the Korean version with AI, and reopened it. Left to instinct alone, those pages would simply have disappeared. What I learned: the decision to discard something is exactly the one to make after looking at the numbers.

② When traffic spikes, go and build a place for it to land

Our blog has an article whose pageviews jump nearly tenfold whenever it gets picked up on television. What I do at moments like that is nothing flashy: rebuild the articles related to it (coupon information and so on), update the dates in the content to the latest. It is unglamorous, but preparing the next page for the people who did show up is what works best. Without looking at the numbers, you would not even know the spike happened.

③ Feed every number to an AI and have it hunt for opportunities

This is a recent practice. Rather than only staring at the five numbers myself, I feed every metric I can pull to an AI and have it dig out where the next opportunity is. A human inevitably looks only at the indicators they already care about. An AI reads across all of them and picks up combinations you had not noticed. The fewer people watching the site — a single manager alone, say — the better this fits.

What to verify when a production company runs the site for you

If operations are outsourced, these five still work as shared vocabulary on the client side. There are only two things to verify.

• Does the monthly report include the count of conversions (key events)? If the report is only pageviews and visitors, try asking: “which event are you counting as an inquiry key event?”
• Does each number come paired with a proposal for what to do next month? Reporting alone is measurement, not operation

Our own site operation is set out in the Site Care Plan (from ¥15,000/month). If you are at the stage of “before that, I just want someone to check whether our GA4 is set up correctly”, ask us in a free consultation.

Once more, to close. Five numbers, once a month, 30 minutes. That alone turns a website from something you merely have into something you grow.

FAQ

Do I really not need to look at pageviews?

Not for routine monthly monitoring. Rising pageviews are not a result if they do not turn into inquiries. What to watch is the five: impressions and clicks in search, conversions (key events), page speed, branded search, and traffic via AI.

I cannot tell whether key events are configured in GA4. What should I do?

In GA4, go to Admin → Events (or Key events) and check whether any event is marked as a key event. If there are none, inquiries are not being measured at all, so make asking your production company to configure it the top priority.

How can I check traffic that arrives via AI?

In GA4, go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition and filter the source by chatgpt.com and similar. In the author’s own measurements it is still small — around 12 sessions a month even on a blog with 190,000 views a year — but it is on the monthly list to track future growth.

What should I check in a production company’s monthly report?

Two things. ① Does the report include the count of conversions (key events)? ② Does each number come with a proposal for what to do next month? If it only reports pageviews and visitors, ask which event they are counting as a key event.