5 Tips for Getting More from GA4’s Standard Reports

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    How to adjust GA4’s prebuilt reports to view the data you need

    The Reports menu of GA4 has some good starting-place reports, but they do have some frustrating components. The fairly useless charts at the top and the always-too-small-to-view table below don’t make it an ideal place to explore. However, it may be time to take another look. Here’s a look at features that can make these reports more useful.

    Log in to Google Analytics and go to Reports > Pages and we’ll walk through a few ways to dig deeper into the data.

    GA report where to compare and filter

    Comparisons

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    Add a comparison using any dimension. Let’s look at pages visited by users who came from organic search and organic social.

    • Click Add comparison above the report title.
    • Select Dimension: Session source / medium, exactly matches, and google / organic.
    • Click Apply.
    • Then click Add comparison again to add a second comparison for organic social.
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    Add more detail to the table rows, for example to see the number of page views for each by source/medium.

    • Click the plus button next to the column header “Page path…”
    • Add Session source /medium as a secondary dimension.
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    Compare data in two different date ranges inside the date control.

    Filters

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    Use the search box above the data table. This is useful to look for a single page, or to narrow your view to a subset of pages, like your /blog/ directory.

    It’s also one way to get better value from the time-series chart, too–to find out when new page when live or a new event started working, search for it by name in the Pages or Events report, and use the chart to see when it began tracking.

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    Use the Add filter button up by the title of the report to filter by traffic source, geography, or demographics. For example, you could see which pages users visited in a geography matching a trade show where your business recently exhibited.

    Questions you can answer in GA4 reports

    With the comparison and filtering options, you can answer lots of interesting questions. Here’s some ideas.

    • Search for a specific page by name to see in the graph when it started getting traffic.
    • See which sources send more traffic to a specific landing page. This might 
    • Filter to see all the pages underneath one subdirectory, and see which have better engagement rates.
    • What websites sent us referral traffic?
    • What are the top product pages viewed by state?
    • What was the engagement rate of users visiting from the August newsletter, versus the July newsletter?
    • Which are the most popular blogs for male vs. female website visitors?
    • What is the top traffic channel for our most important events?
    • On what pages was a key event triggered?

    Hopefully these examples get some ideas flowing. Happy exploring!

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