In this article, we highlight three website metrics that we’ve selected as particularly relevant for 2025 — and for good reason.
These metrics can be tracked in Google Analytics 4 with relatively little effort, are applicable across industries and company sizes, and already provide valuable insights in their basic form. They help you understand how users engage with your content, where they drop off or enter — and whether there are potential roadblocks or opportunities on your website.
By the way, we’ve also created a short video to accompany this article, which you’ll find just below this introduction. In it, we show you exactly where to find these metrics in Google Analytics.
1. Average Time on Page
If you want to understand how well your content is actually performing, average time on page is one of the most important metrics to look at. It shows whether users are actively engaging with the content or leaving the page quickly — a clear indicator of your content’s quality and relevance.
In GA4, this metric can be a bit confusing at first, as there are several versions like Average Engagement Time per User or per Session — and by definition, they refer to the average time spent on the website as a whole, not on a specific page.
However, in the Pages & Screens report, GA4 provides an contextual version that shows how long users spent on a particular page — which makes this metric especially valuable.
Tip: Don’t view this metric in isolation. Combine it with Views and Active Users to understand both the volume and quality of interactions. High time on page combined with strong traffic? That’s a solid indicator of engaging content.
2. Entrance & Exit Pages
If you want to understand which pages play a key role in your users’ journey, it’s worth taking a closer look at entry and exit pages. These metrics reveal where users land on your site — and where they leave.
This is especially relevant for evaluating your marketing performance:
Entry pages show which content serves as the first touchpoint with your website — in other words, where a session begins. Are these the pages you’re actively promoting? Do they align with your campaign goals?
Exit pages indicate where users drop off. Sometimes that’s expected (like a thank you page), but in other cases it might suggest that certain content or page structures aren’t working or don’t lead users forward.
These metrics aren’t part of GA4’s standard reports, but they can be easily created in an Exploration — for example, by using the Page Title dimension together with the Entrances or Exits metrics.
Tip: Combine entrance pages with Page Referrer or Source/Medium to understand which channels are driving users to specific pages — whether it’s from Google, social media, or external links. This helps you identify high-performing content as well as potential sources of irrelevant or unexpected traffic.
3. Error Page Tracking
Error pages are often silent conversion killers in marketing — which is exactly why it’s worth keeping an eye on them. With proper tracking in place, you can identify when users land on pages that no longer exist — often due to outdated campaign links, broken redirects, or incorrect URLs from external sources.
This can be especially critical in performance marketing: if a paid click leads to an error page, you’re not only wasting budget, but also delivering a poor user experience. That’s why error page tracking is a valuable early warning system for both technical and content-related issues.
If your error page uses a unique page title or a specific URL structure (like “404” or “not found”), you can easily filter for it in GA4. If not, it’s worth setting up a custom event via Google Tag Manager to reliably capture error pages.
For more context, combine this with the Page Referrer dimension — this lets you see which previous page the user came from, helping you determine whether the issue stems from internal links or external sources.
You can also use the Entrances metric to check if sessions are starting directly on an error page — a clear sign that links in ads, search engines, or emails may be pointing to the wrong place.
Bonus: Video Engagement
Not officially part of the top 3 — but still important. More and more users prefer short videos over long texts, which makes it essential to understand how your video content is performing.
With the right setup (e.g. via Google Tag Manager), you can track events like play, pause, and completion.
In an Exploration, you can also analyze so-called seek events — moments when users skip forward or backward in a video. Combined with video duration, this shows which parts of your content are watched most often — a strong indicator of what users find especially relevant or potentially unclear.
