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How to Find Key Website Metrics in GA4 & Microsoft Clarity for a Website UX Audit
If your website traffic looks healthy but sales, sign-up, or leads aren't following, the problem usually isn't visibility, it's experience. Visitors are showing up, and something along the way is losing them. The only way to know exactly where and why is to look at the data.
Two tools do this better than almost anything else on the market, and they do it for free: Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Microsoft Clarity. GA4 tells you what is happening on your site — how many people came, where they came from, what they clicked, whether they converted. Clarity tells you why it's happening — how people actually move their mouse, where they get stuck, where they rage-click in frustration, and where they give up and leave.
Used together, these two tools form the analytical backbone of any serious website UX audit. This guide is a complete, practical walkthrough of the exact metrics — Monthly Users, Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, and Session Duration, plus a dozen more — that matter most, exactly where to find each one, and how to read what they're telling you.
Whether you're a business owner trying to understand your own numbers, a marketer preparing a report, or a product manager scoping a redesign, this guide will give you the vocabulary and the navigation paths to find the truth in your data — and, if you decide you'd rather have a specialist take it from here, how professional UX audit services turn these same numbers into a prioritized action plan.
Where to Find Monthly Users in GA4
What "Users" Means in GA4
GA4 tracks several distinct user metrics, and confusing them is one of the most common analytics mistakes:
- Users (Total Users): Anyone who triggered at least one event in the selected date range.
- New Users: Users triggering the first_visit event for the first time — i.e., first-time visitors.
- Returning Users: Users who have visited before within the date range.
- Active Users: GA4's default "Users" metric — anyone with an engaged session in the period. This is what most reports actually mean by "Monthly Users."
Step-by-Step: Finding Monthly Users
- Log in to Google Analytics and select your GA4 property.
- In the left-hand navigation, go to Reports → Life Cycle → Acquisition → User Acquisition.
- Set the date range (top right) to the last full calendar month, or use This month vs. Last month for comparison.
- The Active Users column in the main table is your Monthly Users figure.
- Alternatively, go to Reports → Life Cycle → Engagement → Overview, where "Active Users" is displayed as a headline card with a trend line.
Why Monthly Users Matter
Monthly Users is your baseline traffic health indicator. A UX audit uses this number for context — a 60% bounce rate on a page with 50 monthly visitors is a much lower priority than the same bounce rate on a page with 50,000.
How UX Audit Services Use This Metric
Professional auditors segment Monthly Users by device, channel, and landing page before touching anything else. This tells them where to focus limited audit time and budget — high-traffic, high-friction pages get prioritized first.
Common Mistakes
- Confusing "Users" with "Sessions" (one user can have many sessions).
- Comparing month-over-month without accounting for seasonality.
- Ignoring channel breakdown (organic vs. paid users often behave very differently).
Best Practices
- Always segment by new vs. returning users.
- Compare against the same period last year, not just last month.
- Cross-check spikes or drops against your marketing calendar (campaigns, price changes).
How to Calculate Conversion Rate in GA4
What Conversion Rate Is
Conversion rate is the percentage of users (or sessions) that complete a defined goal — a purchase, a form fill, a demo request.
Formula:
Conversion Rate = (Conversions ÷ Total Sessions or Users) × 100
Example: If your site had 10,000 sessions last month and 250 resulted in a purchase, your conversion rate is 2.5%.
Macro vs. Micro Conversions
Tracking only macro conversions hides where in the journey users are dropping off. Micro conversions let you build a fuller funnel picture.
- Macro conversions are your primary business goals: a completed sale, a signed contract, a booked demo.
- Micro conversions are smaller steps that indicate progress toward a macro conversion: adding to cart, starting a form, watching a product video, downloading a spec sheet.
Events and Key Events in GA4
GA4 replaced Universal Analytics' "Goals" with Events, and any event can be marked as a Key Event (GA4's current term for what used to be called a "Conversion").
Step-by-Step: Marking and Finding Conversions
- Go to Admin → Events (property-level settings).
- Identify or create the event you want to track (e.g., generate_lead, purchase, form_submit).
- Toggle "Mark as key event" next to the relevant event.
- To view conversion rate, go to Reports → Life Cycle → Engagement → Conversions, or build a custom exploration under Explore → Funnel Exploration.
- Session conversion rate and user conversion rate are both available as metrics you can add to any report table.
How UX Impacts Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the single metric where UX and business outcomes meet directly. A confusing checkout, a slow-loading form, or an unclear CTA all show up as depressed conversion rate — even if traffic and interest (sessions, time on page) look healthy.
Best Practices
- Track both macro and micro conversions.
- Segment conversion rate by device — mobile and desktop often diverge sharply.
- Review conversion rate alongside Clarity recordings of sessions that didn't convert, not just ones that did.
Common Mistakes
- Marking too many low-value events as key events, diluting the signal.
- Only measuring conversion rate site-wide instead of per landing page.
- Ignoring statistical significance on low-traffic pages.
Where to Find Bounce Rate in GA4
GA4 Bounce Rate vs. Universal Analytics Bounce Rate
This is a frequent source of confusion. In old Universal Analytics, Bounce Rate meant the percentage of single-page sessions with no interaction. GA4 flipped the default logic: it primarily reports Engagement Rate, and Bounce Rate is essentially its inverse.
Formula:
Bounce Rate = 100% − Engagement Rate
An engaged session in GA4 is one that lasts 10+ seconds, has a key event, or includes 2+ pageviews.
Step-by-Step: Finding Bounce Rate
- Go to Reports → Life Cycle → Engagement → Overview. By default, you'll see Engagement Rate.
- To see Bounce Rate directly, go to Reports → Life Cycle → Engagement → Pages and Screens, then click the metric selector above the table and add "Bounce rate" as a column.
- Alternatively, use Explore → Free Form and manually add "Bounce rate" as a metric.
When High Bounce Rate Is NOT Bad
A high bounce rate isn't automatically a UX failure. A blog post that fully answers a reader's question in one page, or a contact page showing a phone number the visitor immediately called, can "bounce" while still succeeding perfectly at its job.
Common Causes of Problematic Bounce Rate
- Mismatched expectations between an ad/search result and the landing page content.
- Slow page load speed.
- Poor mobile responsiveness.
- Intrusive pop-ups appearing immediately on arrival.
Best Practices
- Always interpret bounce rate alongside page purpose and average engagement time.
- Watch Clarity recordings for high-bounce pages to see if users leave in frustration or leave with intent fulfilled.
Where to Find Session Duration in Microsoft Clarity
Session Duration, Engagement Time, and Time on Page — What's Different
- Session Duration: The total length of a single visit, from first interaction to the last.
- Average Session Duration: The mean session length across a group of sessions.
- Engagement Time (GA4 term): Time the site was actually in the foreground and being actively used — GA4 excludes idle background tabs.
- Time on Page: A legacy metric estimating how long a user stayed on one specific page (imprecise for the last page of a session, since it can't measure "time until close").
Where to Find Session Duration in Clarity
- Log in to Microsoft Clarity and select your project.
- Go to the Dashboard — the overview shows a headline card for "Average Session Duration" alongside Sessions and Pages per Session.
- Go to Recordings to see individual session lengths listed next to each recording thumbnail.
- Go to Heatmaps, select a specific page, and Clarity will show aggregated engagement duration for that page across all recorded sessions.
How UX Experts Interpret Session Duration
Duration alone is ambiguous — a long session can mean deep engagement or confused wandering. UX experts always pair duration with recordings: watching a handful of long sessions quickly reveals whether users are reading and comparing products (good) or repeatedly backtracking and re-clicking the same menu (bad).
Expert Insight: A sudden increase in average session duration right after a redesign is not automatically good news — check recordings first. It may mean users are more engaged, or it may mean they can no longer find what they came for.
FAQs
Why are UX audit services important for ecommerce websites?
Professional UX audit services help businesses uncover hidden issues that impact sales. By analyzing user journeys, product pages, checkout flows, and customer behavior, a UX audit provides actionable recommendations to improve the shopping experience and boost conversion rates.
How is a user experience audit different from a website audit?
A user experience audit focuses on how visitors interact with your website, including usability, accessibility, navigation, and conversion paths. A general website audit may focus on technical performance or SEO, while a UX audit specifically evaluates how well the website supports users in completing their goals.
How does an ecommerce UX audit improve conversion rates?
By identifying friction points throughout the customer journey, an ecommerce UX audit helps optimize product discovery, simplify checkout, improve page layouts, and enhance user trust. These improvements contribute to better ecommerce conversion optimization and higher sales.
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