GA4 Reporting – How to Create Standard GA4 Reports? Guide Part III

Table of contents:

• GA4 Standard Reports - What Are Your Options?
  • Acquisition
    • Acquisition Overview
    • User Acquisition
    • Traffic Acquisition
  • Engagement
    • Event Overview
    • Events
  • Conversion
    • Pages and Screens
    • Monetization
    • Monetization Overview
    • Ecommerce Purchases
    • In-App Purchases
    • Publisher Ads
    • Retention
    • Demographic Data
    • Technology
• Standard GA4 Reports – The Takeaway

GA4 Standard Reports - What Are Your Options?

Google Analytics 4 differs from Universal Analytics and the discrepancies are noticeable with the naked eye. The names, interface, reports, and layout have been modified. At first, you may get confused by the number of options, but don’t worry, we’re here to help. To make it easier for you, we'll walk you through various GA4 standard reports and give you tips on how to use them to draw conclusions and analyze data.

Acquisition

Let’s move on to discussing individual GA4 reports. Where can you find them? After logging into Analytics, hover your mouse over the icons on the left, then select Reports. The first item you'll see on the list is Realtime report. It'll inform you how many users visited your site in the last 30 minutes, what percentage used mobile devices, what pages they visited, and what and how many events occurred. Then in GA4, you’ll see the Lifecycle menu. Click the first item, meaning Acquisition. There are 3 GA4 reports at your disposal, namely acquisition overview, user acquisition, and traffic acquisition. What kind of data will you find there?

Acquisition Overview

This part includes information on the number of users per day, the number of users per minute, and the number of users in the last 30 minutes, as well as their country of residence. Further data includes the sources and channels of individual visits. Moreover, GA4 offers more detailed reports. However, you won't find them in the menu on the left.

User Acquisition

This section primarily includes data on traffic sources. What do they mean?

• Organic Search - redirects from organic search results.
• Direct - situations when users reached the site by typing the site address in the browser.
• Organic Social - this is about free traffic from social networks, such as clicks on posts on Facebook groups or fanpages.
• Referral - this is traffic generated from other websites where the user clicked a link to your page.

When it comes to the sources of visits, the basic ones are source and medium, but GA4 also gives you the option to introduce custom sources. Note that you can choose dimensions for the user acquisition report. You can categorize traffic, such as by the medium accounting for visits or by source, source platform, campaign, and more. In this report, you can also find engagement data, such as:

• Engaged sessions - these include sessions that lasted more than 10 seconds and ended with either a conversion or at least two page views of the site.
• Engagement rate - the percentage of engaged sessions.
• Engaged sessions per user - the average number of engaged sessions per user.
• Average engagement time - the average time the page was active in the browser.
• Number of events (all) - the number of all events triggered by users.
• Conversions (all) - the number of all conversions triggered by users.

Note that for events and conversions, you can choose which specifically you want to check. If you aren't sure what each dimension means, refer to Google's resources.

Traffic Acquisition

In the traffic acquisition report, you can find information about sessions generated by new and returning users. This analysis actually resembles the user acquisition report. However, it offers different dimensions that don't start with "First User", but with "Session". Remember that you can manually tag links to be able to better monitor the sources of visits. This allows you to define the name of the source. This name can later appear in the Google Analytics report. How to use the data? First of all, to monitor the effectiveness of individual traffic sources. You can analyze which ones generate the greatest number of engaged sessions and which ones bring in the most revenue. Based on this, you can analyze whether you're able to increase the number of visits from the most effective traffic source. How to check the engagement of each channel? In the user acquisition report, select First user-source. Then click engagement to sort the sources according to your preferences. You can do the same for the other metrics that interest you - including total revenue. Read more about audiences: Audiences. Google Analytics Guide

Engagement

In the Engagement menu, you'll find detailed data about the activity of users on the site. Thanks to it, you can check, e.g., which pages of your site were visited the most frequently in the last 30 minutes, or which are often visited in a specific time period. Keep in mind that data from a longer period of time will provide you with more valuable insights than data from the last 30 minutes!

Event Overview

This report includes summary data on the activity of users on your site. You can see the average engagement time, the number of users in the last 30 minutes, and the most frequently visited pages during that time. Below you can see how many page impressions there have been, how many events GA4 has recorded, as well as what types of events they were. Subsequent reports show the number of impressions of each page, as well as user activity during a certain period, i.e. how many visits there were.

Events

As the name suggests, in the Events you get detailed data on events. On one of the reports, you'll see the names of each event, the number of events, the total number of users, the number of events per user, and the total revenue, if any. You have many options to choose from, and you can change the specific metric used to present your data. For example, when you check landing page data, you'll see a new column where you can find, among other things, which page is entered at the beginning of the session most often. You may notice that it differs from Universal Analytics. Well, GA4 collects data on many events automatically, which didn't happen in the previous version of the tool. An event called scroll is also an interesting item. It's counted after the user reaches the bottom of each page for the first time, i.e. when a section located at 90% of the vertical depth is visible. It's worth checking which pages have a low score and optimizing them to improve the result.

Conversion

Do you know what conversion is? In this report, you'll find a summary of events that are labeled this way. What can you check? Among others, are the number of buyers, forms sent products that bring the most revenue, or the number of people who order them. What can you do to measure conversions? Well, you can:

• Mark an existing event as a conversion.
• Enable tracking of events as conversions.
• Add monetary values to conversion events.
• Change event parameters and conditions.
• Create conversion events based on existing events, add conditions and parameters to them.

What to do to track an event as a conversion? First, from the main menu, select Configuration. Then, you'll see a table titled Existing events. Click the Mark as conversion button for the selected event. How to create a new event based on an existing one? To do so, click Configuration and then Events. Enter the name, and then you'll see the configuration options. Enter the matching conditions. In this case, it's page_view, but you can of course specify another one, just make sure you've entered the event name correctly. Then click Add Condition, and then an additional line for providing data will be displayed. Click Parameter, and from the options displayed, select page_location. In the Operator field, select Contains, and in the Value field, select the name of the page. If the subpage is called contact.htm, for example, just type contact. Then press Create. The event will be shown among the custom events. Mark the new event as a conversion. From the Configuration menu, select Conversions. Next, click New conversion event. Enter the exact name of the event and click Save. It’ll already be marked as a conversion.

Pages and Screens

This report contains information about the user's interaction with the website. You'll find data on individual pages of the site. In this section you can check the number of impressions, average engagement, scroll per user, and other information, taking into account the performance of each sub-page. Based on this, you can analyze elements such as the average engagement time and check if any pages have results lower than the average. Then implement necessary changes to improve the situation.

Monetization

The reports you'll find in this section were previously found in Universal Analytics in the e-commerce tab. As the name suggests, it contains data on the revenue generated from the site and from the app.

Monetization Overview

In this section, you'll find data from detailed reports - these can include purchases generated by the site, app, or ads.

Ecommerce Purchases

In this report, you'll find information about the revenue generated by the products you sell and the interactions with these products. In order to display revenue data here, you must use the required parameters in each e-commerce event. In addition, you can also use optional and custom parameters, however, custom values aren't displayed in the reports. Of course, collecting this data is possible only after the events are properly configured.

In-App Purchases

In this report, you'll see data on the revenue from in-app purchases by product ID (the individual number of each item in the store). In order to ensure that GA4 collects this information, you need to send events: in_app_purchase and subscription. This will happen automatically if:

• You integrate the iOS app with the Google Analytics SDK for Firebase,
• You connect Google Play with the Firebase project for Android apps.

Publisher Ads

Thanks to this report, you can collect data on revenue generated by ads in the mobile app, by ad unit. To make this possible, you must first set up a measurement of these revenues. Then you'll be able to monitor revenue data in GA on platforms such as AdMob, AppLovin, and ironSource.

Retention

Here you can check the score relating to new and returning users, as well as the cohort analysis report. You'll find out how often and how long new users use your site or app after their first visit. What does the aforementioned cohort mean? It's a group of users who share a common characteristic defined by a dimension in Google Analytics. One cohort, for example, includes all the users you acquired on the same day. One of the reports you'll see in this section is User Retention by cohort. It'll tell you what percentage of users returned to your site on the second and eighth days. Another report shows the amount of time these users spent on the site. The next chart illustrates user retention for 42 days, i.e. it shows what percentage of visitors accessed your site on consecutive days over the period of those 42 days. Another report shows their time-averaged engagement.

Demographic Data

GA4 also provides you with detailed demographic data, which is collected on the basis of the pages visited by users and their purchase history. The location of users is determined based on IP. You can get the following information:

• country,
• city,
• gender,
• interests,
• age,

For individual reports, you'll see detailed data, including engaged sessions, engagement rate, average engagement time, and total revenue generated by visitors from a particular country, for example. Based on the data from these reports, you can determine which target group is responsible for the highest revenue and, among other things, make decisions about the people you target with an ad campaign, such as Google Ads.

Technology

In this section, you'll find information about the devices used by visitors to the site. It's a great way to get insights into:

• operating systems,
• platforms or devices,
• the browser used to access the page,
• screen resolutions,
• application versions.

For each report, you can go to the details and check, among other things, engaged sessions, the average engagement time, or the revenue generated by a particular user group.

Standard GA4 Reports - The Takeaway

GA4 will provide you with a variety of data about your site's visitors and their activities. Tracking and analyzing them will make it easier for you to make successful executive decisions concerning your advertising, sales, or user engagement strategies. We hope that this GA4 reports guide will help you navigate this tool and get exactly the data you need!