If you’re reading this article, you’ve likely encountered the "conveniences" of working with reports in Google Analytics 4. While everything was neatly organized in Universal Analytics, here, it takes more effort to find the necessary information. Let’s walk through how to find the information you need step by step.
In Google Analytics 4, there are several ways to get information from reports:
➊ Home
👉 Provides basic reports, each of which you can explore further to get more detailed information:
➋ Reports/p>
👉 Standard reports in Google Analytics 4, which have a structure that differs from Universal Analytics:
The traditional "traffic sources" report looks like this:
Immediately noticeable is the option to edit user-defined channel groups. You can select your own group:
If you need to customize the report, you won’t be able to do it as easily as in Universal Analytics, where you could simply add columns on the same page. Here, you need to click "edit" before making any changes to the report:
This covers working with standard reports that already have some presets.
➌ Explorations
If you need a more in-depth analysis, you should use the “explore” tab, which provides more advanced capabilities.
The explorations tab looks like this:
Here, you can create custom reports using templates from the template gallery, save them, and return to your data analysis later.
Let’s look at how to create an exploration without using a template, as not all templates work properly yet.
There are two key components in an exploration: variables and tab settings, which are interconnected. In the variables section, you define the global variables you want to analyze, and in the tab settings, you specify how you want to analyze them.
Let’s take the traditional "source/medium" report from the old analytics as an example.
In the variables section, we input the following data: in dimensions (what will appear in the rows) - this is how we want to break down the data, and in metrics (what will appear in the columns) - this is what we want to analyze. In the tab settings, specify: rows, values, and additional display settings. The result looks like this:
Similarly, you can work with other data that you need.
These are the key basics of extracting data from reports in Google Analytics 4. In the future, we will dive into even deeper details of GA4 analytics, as it represents the future of web analytics, even though many of us are used to Universal Analytics.
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