7 essential Analytics reports to make your life easier
- owwwla
- 5 maj
- 14 minut(y) czytania
Zaktualizowano: 5 maj
This article should have two introductions: for those who are new to Google Analytics and don’t yet know how it can make their lives easier, and for those who are moving from Universal Analytics (or GA3) to Google Analytics 4 but are confused by the new naming and aren’t sure where to find their reports.
What we all have in common is that sometimes we all look in GA4 like Vincent Vega:
To the first group, I should say this: Google Analytics is a comprehensive analytical tool that collects data about user actions on your website. With its small JavaScript code, you can find out which pages are visited most often, where users come from, or what they click on.
In this article, I describe seven Google Analytics 4 reports that you will use on a regular basis. They provide the most important information about your website traffic, and checking them quickly becomes a habit. Remember that only the combination of data from several reports will give you the full picture.
To the second group I would say this: Google Analytics 4 is a differently constructed tool, in which not only the way of measuring traffic has changed, from hits to events, but also the form of presenting data in reports. It is difficult to navigate them now along the paths beaten in the previous GA. If you are looking for your basic reports, I will help you find them and show you how they have changed. For your convenience, I indicate in the titles which reports from GA3 you can refer to them.
So, open your Analytics account and let's start exploring :-)
Note: Remember that the reports show data for the selected period (except for the "Real time" report). You can find the date range at the top of the report page on the right. Choose the period interesting for you or compare two different time periods. By default, Analytics shows data for last 28 days until yesterday. Today's data will appear tomorrow, because it takes time to process and aggregate in the appropriate places in a large number of reports. The exception is the Real Time report set.
Besides, reports can show full page data or sampled data. You can recognize this by a green or red icon next to the report name.
Reports in GA4 are grouped into collections: Lifecycle and User. If their menu seems confusing to you, first check out my article on how to navigate the new Analytics (click here to open in a new tab).
For your convenience, each report name is a link to the appropriate section of this article. You can always jump into the one which interests you right now, without the tiresome scrolling.
4. Events
Traffic acquisition (former Source / Medium)
Where to find: (left menu) Reports > Lifecycle > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition
Traffic acquisition, or where each session on your website comes from. When you look at this report, you will notice that all dimensions that appear here, i.e. source, medium or default channel group, have names starting with "Session -". This lets you know that you are checking data from all traffic. To distinguish, in user acquisition reports you will see "First User -", but more on that in a moment.
Just to make sure we are on the same page: What is hidden behind the words source / medium?
Behind "source" is information about the domain from which the user went to your domain, i.e. for example google.com or bing.com, when they found it in the search engine, and websiteatwojegoulubionegoblogera.pl, when they clicked on the link in the article of your favorite blogger. If he entered the address directly into the address bar (he may have your site in his bookmarks or he remembers the address), the source will be described as "direct". Interesting fact: some domain names appear in different versions, as in the case of Facebook: it can be written as l.facebook.com, m.facebook.com or facebook.com.
"Medium" means the type of traffic, specifically free ("organic"), referrals ("referral"), paid results ("cpc") or direct ("none").
Organic medium means entries from Internet search engines, such as Google, Bing or Baidu
referrals mean for visits redirected from other domains, such as facebook.com, myfriendblog.com
paid results are sessions that were started by clicking on your paid advertisement, for example created in Ads or on Facebook.
and "none" means direct entries.
The source and medium appear in the list providing full information about the origin of the session, which is why they are written with a slash as "source / medium". In the table in the report, each row is devoted to one of them.
Based on the medium, or less often the combination of medium and source, traffic acquisition channels are described. The default configured channels are:
Direct
Organic (Search, Social, Video, Shopping)
Paid (Search, Social, Video, Other, Shopping)
Referral
Email
SMS
Display
Affiliates
Audio
Cross-network.
If the above list is too tight for you, you can create your own custom channel group. You will find the settings in Administration > Property > Data display > Channel groups.
Note: If you have a lot of sessions marked as "(direct) / (none)" or "Unassigned", be sure to check whether your Analytics or a cookie banner is correctly implemented in the website code. If there is more than one Analytics script with the same ID in the code, each of them will send information about the page view to the reports, and in addition, the second and subsequent codes will see that the browser is already on your website, so it will assume that the next view comes from the same domain. The effect will be an inflated number of views in the reports and information about direct entries, because technically it will look like the user entered the website from yourdomain.pl.
You can also check the sources of traffic to the website by the source platform (e.g. Google Ads) or campaign. The latter is very practical if you direct mailings, social media campaigns or ads to your recipients and customers.
You can select each of the dimensions listed by clicking the arrow next to the header of the first column of the table to see the segregated data.
What can you check here?
Here you can see how many users visited your website and how many sessions there were from a specific source / medium / channel / campaign / source platform. For example, if there are 5 users in total and 10 sessions, you can immediately see that your recipients are coming back.
The data in this report will tell you how users engage with the session. Engaged sessions by default mean staying on the website for more than 10 seconds. There is also the number of events during the session. In this case, remember that in Google Analytics 4, an event is any interaction with the page, i.e. viewing the page, scrolling it, clicking, downloading a file or watching a video. The more events, the more interested your recipient is in the content of your store, blog or art gallery. Counting events is independent of the number of page views, so you don't have to worry about whether you have all the content on one page - GA4 will show you whether the user is engaging with what you want to tell them.
Note: If you think that a session lasting 10 seconds does not yet indicate the recipient's engagement or that - on the contrary - it is too long, you can change this parameter in Administration > Property (right column) > Data streams > [select the appropriate stream] > Google Tag > Configure tag settings > [click on "Show more"] > Adjust session duration > Adjust timer for sessions with engagement.
The columns regarding conversions show you whether they were completed in sessions from specific sources / media / channels / campaigns / source platforms. Note that in the header of this column you can choose which conversion you are currently checking. You can choose either one at a time or all of them.
Tip: Use the secondary dimension.
When viewing reports in Google Analytics, you can check additional information by clicking the "+" button, which you will find to the right of the main dimension. You can add one dimension at a time, for example, if you want to check from which source in the Organic Social channel you have so many newsletter subscriptions.
Where to from here?
If you’re interested in where you’re getting new users from, check out the next section of this article. Among the acquisition data in GA4, you’ll also find information about traffic from your Ads campaign. Go to: Reports > Lifecycle > Acquisition > Overview and find the Session tab – Google Ads campaign.
You can find more about acquisition reports in the Google documentation. I’ll provide links to it at the bottom of the article.
User acquisition (former Source / Medium)
Where to find: (left menu) Reports > Lifecycle > Acquisition > User Acquisition
What can you check here?
Here you can see how many new users visited your site from a specific source / medium / channel / campaign / source platform.
Unlike the Traffic Acquisition report that I described above, in this one you will find data ONLY from users' first visits. What does this mean in practice? If Tomek visited Monika's Norwegian language course page for the first time from her Facebook campaign, he will be recorded in the User Acquisition report data and the Traffic Acquisition report data. But when he returns to her page after two days to check the details again and sign up for the norskprøve course, this session will only be in the Traffic Acquisition report, because Tomek is already a returning user, not a new one.
In this report, you can choose dimensions that present the source / medium / channel / campaign / source platform, but each of them starts with "First User -". Pay attention to this, because you will probably create your own reports or modify existing ones and it is important to choose the right parameters.
Pages and screens (former All pages)
Where to find: Reports > Lifecycle > Engagement > Pages and Screens
This report collects data for individual pages, which you can browse by their titles, such as Knowledge Base - Analytics Zone | Owwwla or Google Analytics Consulting | Owwwla, or by the page path, i.e. fragments of URLs, such as /google-analytics-knowledge-base or /google-analytics-consulting. Titles seem more readable, but if you are already used to Universal Analytics, you will automatically look for addresses that appear in the browser.
It is worth remembering that GA4 primarily operates on page titles when creating a new site. Marek, from mojechatkinadmorzem.pl, after moving his website to a new platform, discovered that each page with an offer was titled "My cottage by the sea". Considering that both GA4 and search engines use this element of the page, he spent an hour adding the word "Offer" and the name of the room to each one. In this way, he did a favor to both potential vacationers and himself, because the page reports immediately became much more readable.
What can you check here?
Each row of the table is data for one page. They are arranged from the one with the most views to the one that was viewed the least times. If it is more important to you which page was displayed the longest, click on the column header "Average engagement time" and the report will be arranged according to this parameter. Other data includes Users, Views per user (maybe people are happy to view a specific offer, or maybe they refresh the page because it loads slowly - check it out!), Total revenue, as well as the number of events and the number of conversions.
In the case of these last two metrics, you can choose which specific event or conversion to show. So if Mark chooses to click on the email address and sees that the most such events were on the sea view room page, he will know that this offer is of particular interest. The list of conversions to choose from includes, of course, those events that were previously marked as conversions and have already started to accumulate.
What is most important here?
First of all, you can find out which pages are the most popular among your recipients. Keeping in mind which pages you direct users to, for example by publishing a link to an article on LinkedIn, you can immediately check how many times they were viewed, and the average time spent on the page gives you an idea of whether the article was read (over a minute, depending on the length of the text) or only "swept" (in a few seconds). If you are particularly interested in whether your article was really read, you can configure the appropriate event triggered by the Tag Manager.
Tip: If your website has hundreds of pages, it is worth grouping them into several clear categories, such as Products, Blog, Order. Such information is not yet in the standard GA4 configuration (we hope that it will appear at some point), but it can be transmitted using a tag in GTM. If you need help with such an implementation, contact me (contact here - link). I will be happy to help.
Where to next from here?
If you run campaigns that lead online users to specific pages of your website, then take a look at the Landing Page report to check if they actually end up there and how much these pages engage them.
Events
Where to find: Reports > Engagement > Events
Events in GA4 are basically any user interaction with the page, so an event will be both viewing the page, scrolling it, starting or stopping the video, as well as various types of clicks or searching for terms on the site. They are divided into:
events collected automatically, i.e. those that are collected by default after setting up Google Analytics
advanced measurement events, such as scroll, click, file_download, which you can always disable
recommended events that you implement yourself (e.g. using Tag Manager) according to Google's definition, such as add_to_cart, login - they will not appear in reports until you start sending them to GA4
and custom events, completely defined by you, for example click_email - they will also not appear in reports until you implement them on the site and start sending data to GA4.
All events that GA4 collects will appear in the Events report. You will learn how many events there were, how many users performed them, and how many events there were per user.
Tip: If you add an additional dimension (+) "Page path and screen class", you will learn on which pages the events will appear in specific numbers and determine their effectiveness.
What can you check here?
At a glance, you will see the list of most frequently occurring events and see if there are as many as you expect. Looking at the number of events per user, you can see how many pages are visited on average during a single session or how often site visitors perform a specific action, such as adding an offer to favorites, to a cart, or how often they search for terms using the internal search engine. If often, maybe the menu is not very legible?
You will also notice whether there are definitely more cart additions than orders. If not, it means that some data is being lost somewhere and it is worth going through the store yourself to check it.
Where to go from here?
You can access individual reports for each event by clicking on its name. There you will see the values of the parameters that are collected in a given event, such as the details of the pages viewed (page_view).
Planning > All channels (for key events or conversions)
Where to find: Advertising > Planning > All channels
A key event (formerly: conversion) is a user interaction with your website that has value for you (not necessarily financial). An example of a key event for a blogger is reading an article, for a store owner it is primarily a purchase. In many cases, it is also displaying the "contact" page, sending a message, clicking a button related to a specific action, such as downloading or sending. I am devoting a separate article to this topic, which has worked for Universal Analytics so far, and I will soon update it for GA4 (click here to open the article in a new tab).
These is no more a specific key event report in GA4, yet key events data is displayed in the Advertising section of the property. Here you can see only the events that you mark as key events by moving a slider next to the event name on the list in Administration > Property settings > Data display > Events. With the same slider, you can remove a key event from the list at any time.
What can you check here?
Here you will read the number of key events from specific campaign and the campaign metrics, such as clicks, cost or revenue.
It is worth choosing an additional dimension (+), which will allow you to enter this data in context, for example a device category or city where the key events took place. It is good to know whether valuable actions are taken by users who were attracted to the site by advertising, social media or perhaps they find it themselves on the web. This is a hint on what is worth investing time and effort in.
Where next from here?
It is worth checking Advertising > Attribution > Attribution paths to check how many interactions and from which channels users have with your site before they convert. This is how Marek checks whether his newsletter campaigns are effective. Maybe in your case it's a matter of social media campaigns, or maybe it turns out that a completely different channel is important to you and worth investing time and energy in?
Tip: Look at how attribution is assigned to individual channels. Until GA4 collects enough data to assign conversions to channels that are more valuable to your website, it will assign them to the last channel on the conversion path, and you will find these channels in other reports as responsible for these conversions. But the Attribution paths report clearly shows you that this is not so obvious.
Monetization reports (former E-commerce)
Where to find: Life cycle > Monetization
E-commerce in GA4 has changed in that you no longer have to configure reports for these activities separately, but it still requires implementing additional code on your website (and that won't change). Fortunately, there are a lot of plugins on store building platforms that make this task easier. These reports show conversions for purchases or actions that may resemble purchases, such as reservations. They help you see where customers came from, when and what they bought.
What can you check here?
In this report, you will find information about which products were viewed, added to the cart or purchased, and what was the revenue from a specific product during a given period.
Currently, in this set of reports there are E-commerce purchases, Purchase journey, Checkout journey, Transactions, Promotions. If you need anything else, think about creating your own report or exploration.
For example, for a store, the conversion rate will be important information, i.e. what percentage of sessions ended in a transaction. In this case, it is worth editing the report by adding the "Conversion rate per session" indicator - it will be returned as another column to the table.
Where do we go from here?
Again, I recommend going to Advertising > Attribution > Attribution paths to see how customers reach the key event. Even knowing whether your audience tends to visit your site multiple times before making a decision or buys/books on the fly is important and should be included in your customer outreach strategy.
Tip: Don’t forget to enable the appropriate currency in your product settings. Analytics calculates conversion values based on the exchange rate on the day of the transaction, so you may see surprising numbers in the default US dollar, while selling in GB pounds. If you have a store with multiple currencies, set Analytics to the one that’s your primary currency (for example, you bill your ads in it). The rest will be converted automatically for your reports.
If you want to set up e-commerce reporting in GA4, check out Google’s documentation: [GA4] Set up e-commerce events.
Realtime overview and Realtime pages
Where to find it: Reports > Real-time
These are two special type reports, which is why they are in the unique last place. Real-time shows data from your site for the last 30 minutes. Here you can see where in the world your users are coming from, from what sources, from what type of devices (mobile / desktop / tablet), on which pages they are (by title), what events and key events they have completed.
Important: You cannot edit this report, but you can set a segment related to a specific city.
Note: In Universal Analytics, the Real Time report was used to test website activity. In GA4, this is done in Debug View (Admin > Property Settings > Data display > Debug View), which is enabled if you use the "Preview" option in Google Tag Manager or the Google Analytics Debugger plugin in Chrome.
Additional resources (click to go)
Knowledge base:
Google documentation:
If you have any questions or topics that I haven't covered here that you're particularly interested in, write me and I'll be happy to help.
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