How To Filter Organic Traffic In Looker Studio With GA4 Data

Are you looking to analyze (and visualize) user behaviour on the site through Google Analytics and Looker Studio reports?

This post shows how to filter organic traffic in Looker Studio using GA4 data.

I’ll use session scope dimensions and metrics to create a report for analyzing user behaviour from organic sources.

Understanding User vs Session-Scoped Dimensions

To analyze user behaviour, I generally use session-scoped dimensions and metrics. I do this because I generally use GA4 and GSC data together.
However, documentation is unclear on whether it aggregates clicks and impressions for users or counts every click made from its search page to the same URL made by a single user. I treat it as the latter, because every time a click is made, it leads to a session in GA4. For most purposes, using session-scored dimensions in GA4 does the trick for me.

You can learn more scoping of traffic-source dimensions in this answer.

Assuming that you’ve connected your GA4 property to Looker Studio, we can directly dive into creating a simple dashboard for reporting organic performance in Looker Studio.

To keep things simple, we’ll use the “Landing Page” dimension instead of the page path.

Landing page dimension in GA4: This is the first-page path that is associated with the first view in the session. This is helpful because you want to analyze users coming from organic sources such as Google Search on pages that they first visited.

Depending on the goal of your report and attribution modelling, you can also use page path.

Structure of Report Showing Organic Traffic Sources

To explain it here, I’ve taken 2 dimensions – Landing page and Session source/medium. And for metrics, I’ve taken:

Average session duration: To see how long on average a visitor spends on the page.
Depending on the page type and page purpose, you should be able to figure out if the page has enough engagement.
For example: For a long ‘how to’ guide, which is top of the funnel for my business, I should expect to see 3 minutes of average duration if the total read time is 10 minutes (because people skim!).
Sessions: Total number of sessions that came from a source (Organic once filtered).
Engagement rate: This is the percentage of engaged sessions out of total sessions. This helps understand the text and audience relevancy of ad campaigns – because if the engagement rate on a campaign landing page is too low – either the page needs a revamp or the targeting in the campaign does.
Event count per user: This shows the number of events per user.
While the engagement rate generally shows a broad picture, this helps me understand if the users interacted with the page. To use this metric to its full potential, you should know how much of an engagement (number of events) can happen on that page. You can also use session recording tools such as MS Clarity (Free), to know the general level of interactions.
Key events: These are the events that led to a goal (such as purchase or registration).
This metric helps us analyze the most important pages impacting the bottom line.

Again not going too much into the basics of Looker Studio, this is how you can structure your report so that you will be ready to filter the organic traffic.

dimensions and metrics for creating looker studio report to show organic data. — Dimensions and metrics to create a simple dashboard showing organic performance

Your table should look like this below with all the dimensions and metrics pulled into it. Additionally, you can add controls for the landing page, session source/medium and date range to analyze a particular page or source during a specific period.

Looker Studio report screenshot showing website pages and traffic sources from all sources — Landing pages and sessions from all traffic sources

Now if you notice, you can the traffic source is not filtered, and the report is showing the landing page sessions from all sources. We need to put a filter to show traffic from organic sources only.

Apart from all sources being shown, you can also see (not set) values in the landing page column. To make our report cleaner we need to remove not set values so we only see the data which we can analyze.

How to Filter Organic Traffic in Looker Studio Reports (With GA4 Data)

To start filtering data, go to the ‘Setup” Tab under the right sidebar. After you click the tab, you’ll see the option to create a filter at the bottom. Click on “Create Filter”.

Filter option as visible under the setup tab in chart options in Looker studio

In the section that pulls up from the bottom, name your filter. I’ve given it “Organic source only”.

From little experience, I try to give the names as descriptive as possible. Because these filters can be used throughout the report and in other pages as well. So if you’re creating a longer report, you’ll have a list of filters, and reusing it again can be a hassle if you’ve not named it right.

On to our goal of filtering organic traffic, Select “Include”, and “Session source/medium” in the dimension and type “organic” so that it can filter in all such instances where the source is organic.

organic filter session sourcemedium lookerstudio 1

And to remove the not set value containing rows in your table, you can create another filter and exclude all landing pages where the value contains “not set”.

removing not set values from landing pages data.

After you’ve added these filters, you be able to see website pages where the traffic source is organic in Looker Studio. Your result should look like this.