This guide is intended to help you understand and get the most out of backlink analysis using GA4.

You will know how to look at backlinks with google analytics so you can take advantage of opportunities such as:

• Improve your positioning in search engines
• Establish partnerships with other websites
• Protect your website from bad quality links
• Obtain more authority.

You will be able to find and track backlinks (called referrals) in Google Analytics 4 in the Traffic Acquisition report under Acquisition.

The report can be filtered to show referral traffic only.

While it's great that other websites are sending traffic to yours, the backlinks that made it to your GA4 reports are not guaranteed to be of quality or relevance.

In some cases, some may also distort their analysis and damage your business.

But first, I will explain:

What are Backlinks and Why are they Important?

When other websites include links back to your website, these are called backlinks.

Essentially, backlinks are important because Google and other search engines consider them a key ranking factor.

The more backlinks you have, the more chances you have to rank/position.

Getting backlinks is like having other websites voting for you and telling search engines that your site and your content is useful, trustworthy and satisfying to their audience.

The higher you rank, the more chances you have to get additional traffic, which ultimately means more opportunities to achieve your goals, such as converting prospects into customers.

How to track backlinks in Google Analytics 4?

1. In your Google Analytics account, go to Reports → Acquisition/Generated Leads → Traffic Acquisition.

2. You can also create a filter to show you only the media from which the backlink comes from:

3. If you want to know where exactly that backlink comes from, you only have to change the dimension

And this is how it should look like, a filtered list of all the urls showing where the backlink comes from.

How to Measure Traffic generated by backlinks?

To measure website traffic, first, use the method we covered above to access the referrals in your Traffic Acquisition report. Don't forget to add the Source/Means of Session dimension to see all your referrals.

From here, you can see how your collaborative strategies are working with other domain owners by looking at Conversions/Key Events or KPIs that you feel are necessary.

If you are not already partnered or working with anyone, take note of the referrals that are bringing in Users or have a good Average Time Spent per session.

Along the same lines, you can find which content works best for your referral traffic by adding the Landing Page + Query String dimensions to see where users from referral sources land.

It uses the same method as mentioned above (number of users, average time spent per session and conversions).

A good average dwell time per session means that the content is engaging and should do more of that.

The Bounce Rate metric may be available in the scans. You can also use it to find out if these pages meet your expectations or if they make them run away.

Use Comparisons to compare your referral traffic with other channels and segments.

Summary

This guide has provided an overview of backlink analysis, including how to find and verify backlinks in Google Analytics 4, how to remove unwanted backlinks, how to measure your referral traffic, and how to improve your link building efforts.

It is worth mentioning that you should verify that your users coming from external websites are not being redirected from broken links that lead to pages on your website that no longer exist.

We cover how to track, find and fix 404 errors in GA4 if you are interested.

As always, we hope you found this publication useful. Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below.

We will be happy to further assist you with your backlink analysis and digital marketing strategies.