How to see traffic by country in Google Analytics (GA4) – and why you should filter to identify only countries you supply to

Google Analytics can be used to get a view of website visitors by country.  I show you how to to this and also think about solutions that go further with countries analysis.

Most businesses look at total website traffic and assume it reflects real market interest.

But, if you only supply to certain countries, a large portion of that traffic may be irrelevant.

Google Analytics (GA4) allows you to see website traffic by country and filter reports to focus only on visitors from the countries you actually sell to. When you do this properly, you often discover that your real conversion rate, engagement levels, and commercial performance look very different from your headline numbers.

This guide shows you:

  • How to see traffic by country in Google Analytics
  • How to filter reports to only show target countries
  • How to drill down into product or service pages
  • How to save filtered reports for ongoing use
  • Why filtering by supply countries improves business decisions
  • Alternative methods to filtering traffic by country

If you want clearer, commercially meaningful analytics rather than inflated vanity metrics, this is the process to follow, if you use Google Analytics.

Why total traffic figures can mislead you

Many websites receive traffic from countries they don’t operate in or is traffic that they don’t want to skew their data.

For example:

  • You may only supply to customers in the UK but are receiving 30% traffic from outside the UK
  • You see lots of traffic to certain pages (e.g. your services or products pages), but are only interested in traffic related to countries you can serve.

How irrelevant countries distort your data

If you don’t filter by country:

  • You’d be comparing visits to your service/product pages to everyone who visits them, not just those of value to you
  • Your conversion rate may look lower than it really is
  • Engagement metrics are diluted
  • Revenue per user appears weaker
  • Marketing decisions are based on noise.  Many people go down a path of working on their website pages when reality is that many of the visitors would never have become customers.

Filtering analytics by the countries you actually supply to removes that distortion.

Step 1 - Start with overall monthly traffic in GA4

Before filtering, begin broad.

  1. Log into Google Analytics.
  2. Click Reports.
  3. Set your date range to the last full month.

At this stage, you are seeing:

  • All users
  • All countries
  • All pages

This is your baseline.

Step 2 - How to see traffic by country in Google Analytics (GA4)

Accessing the country report

  1. Go to Reports.
  2. Click User – User Attributes.
  3. Click Demographics details.

If needed, change the primary dimension to Country.

You will now see:

  • Active users by country
  • Engagement metrics
  • Conversions
  • Revenue (if applicable)

 

What to look for in the GA4 country report

Focus on:

  • Percentage of traffic from your main market
  • Unexpected high-traffic regions
  • Countries with strong engagement but low volume
  • Countries with high volume but low engagement

This is where patterns begin to appear.

In this example, for a business that targets UK only, 86.83% of their visitors were engaged, but they also have huge numbers of China visitors who:

  1. aren’t the target market
  2. aren’t engaged.

 

Step 3 - Filter GA4 to only show countries you supply to

Now you need to add a country filter

  1. Click Add filter at the top of the report.
  2. Choose Country as the dimension.
  3. Select exactly matches.
  4. Tick the country or countries where you sell to (e.g., United Kingdom).

Click Apply.

Your report now shows only visitors from that country.

 

How filtering changes your metrics

Once filtered, you will notice:

  • Total users drop
  • Engagement rate improves

That’s a good thing – it means that you now have a refined picture of how people in your target countries have engaged with your website.

Next it’s time to focus on how many of those refined visitors got to important pages – for example, your product or service pages …

Step 4 - Drill down to product or service pages

Seeing broad country-level data is useful, but the real insights come when you combine geography with page-level behaviour.

Most businesses want to get a clearer picture of why they’re not selling more of what they offer.  Filtering analytics data down to only visitors from countries of interest allows you to do that.

 

Filter pages and screens to country/countries

  1. Click on Reports – Engagement – Pages and screens.
  2. That shows you all visitors who got to all your pages.
  3. In the search area, type part of the url structure related to what you want to analyse.  In the view below I’ve chosen to view all those pages that have /product/ within the url.  Currently it’s still showing visits from all countries.
  4. To view only visits from your country/countries of interest, click on Add comparison at the top and then click on Create new.

  5. Select Dimension of: Country.
  6. Select Match Type as: exactly matches.
  7. Select your target country/countries only.
  8. Click Save (and give it a name – you may want to apply Country to other reports in the future).
  9. Click Apply.

Your view will then show you those page urls with All Users plus also the country/countries that you filtered by.   This will show you how many people within your target area got to those pages (vs everyone who got there).

You are now able to compare visits to each page – purely from people in your target location(s) – to the levels of sales or enquiries you had related to relevant visits to those pages.

That’s useful on a monthly basis and even more telling when you expand to a longer time period and think about each product or service.  If the enquiry levels or sales are particularly low vs the visitors then you’ll know you have much to achieve with your website strengthening (and sometimes need to fix marketing that’s bringing the wrong people to your website pages).

Saving your filtered Google Analytics reports for future use

You now have a report that would be useful for you to quickly access in the future, instead of going through all these steps afresh.

Here’s how to save your report:

  1. Click the pencil icon on the top right (Customise report).
  2. Click Save – Save as a new report.
  3. Enter a report name that you will remember and click Save.

To re-use your saved report in the future, click on Library to see your reports.  When you run it in the future you will just need to change the date range.

 

Common mistakes when analysing traffic by country

Mistake 1 – Looking only at users

Users alone tell you very little.

Look at:

  • Engaged sessions
  • Engagement rate
  • Conversions & Revenue (if you sell products via your website)

Although you’re looking at a broad combination of users, you should still be looking at how well they engaged (or didn’t!) with your pages overall.

 

Mistake 2 – Ignoring the big numbers first

I recommend that you give priority to the product or service pages that have the highest levels of visitors from your target country/countries.

You are already getting visitors to those pages and you may also be using paid traffic to get them there.

By comparing enquiries/sales to numbers of visitors to your most popular pages, you will be able to ask yourself the question:  what impact would it have if we increased the percentage of enquiries/sales for that?

There will be many reasons why you’ve not got enough enquiries/sales from people in your target geography – now you have your starting point from which to focus on how to improve your results

 

Mistake 3 – Relying purely on Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you a rough view of visitors from your target countries but you ideally need to bring in stronger analytics tools to dig deeper into each visitor to those pages.

These include heatmapping tools such as the free Microsoft Clarity, and detailed analytics software that lets you visually see specific patterns.

Microsoft Clarity heatmapping

While there are many heatmapping software providers and some of them have additional features, Microsoft Clarity is free and provides enough insights for most small businesses.

Using Clarity you can filter your website visitors data by country and visits to specific pages and:

  1. See an overall view of how far all those visitors scrolled down each page.
  2. See an overall view of what those visitors clicked on within each page.
  3. See individual video recordings of the mouse/phone movements of each visitor to each page.

This is extremely useful when you’ve gained this information and then want to then micro-analyse in more depth:

  1. You know the numbers of people who visited your website from your target country or countries.
  2. You know how many of those people looked at your product or service pages.
  3. You know how many enquiries/sales you got related to those visits.

Your next step is to get more granular, which Microsoft Clarity is very good at.

Page by page views of visitors by country

Another analytics method of filtering website visitors by country is via the software I provide, which allows you to create a very granular view of visitors.

Here’s an example:

Identify visitors from UK and France, who got to a specific section of a website, but who didn’t get to the deeper level of that website.

You can see how that’s easily done in this video:

You can then take such data and cross-reference it to the dates and times recorded in something like Microsoft Clarity so that you totally absorb how people from those countries interacted with your website.