One of the questions I get a lot with regards to GA4 is, what happened to views?
In Universal Analytics, a View is a reporting level within a property. A property usually equates to a website, where you have the tracking code on a website. Views can be used to:
Views are really handy, especially if you have a big complicated website with multiple subdomains. It is fairly common to want to look at the subdomain separately, but it’s really helpful to be able to use the same tracking code and same set up in Google Tag Manager, etc.
In GA4, there are no views, which is unfortunate, and there’s no equivalent to views, but I will show you a technique for bringing back a lot of the capabilities of views using collections.
Like all our GA4 Tutorials, in the video and the steps below, we’ll show you some tips and tricks so that you can get back most of the functionality that you had in Universal Analytics, plus a few nifty new features in GA4.
Let’s take the example of creating a view that’s just US traffic. Why would I want to do this? Our business serves customers in the US, we hire people in the US, we’re especially interested in people in the US, but there is a lot of traffic from outside the US. I’d like a view of just US traffic.
Start with any standard report, for example Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
Now you can see the published collection in your Reports menu.
In Universal Analytics, a View allowed you to see all the standard Google Analytics reports, filtered for a set of traffic. In GA4, you can create customized filtered reports, and save them into Collections. While it may take a little bit longer to set up GA4 filtered reports for everything you want to see, you can also create a set of reports that targets only the data you’re most interested in seeing. Customized, filtered reports, saved into collections covers most of the cases I’ve used views for in the past, so it feels like a pretty good alternative to what we were used to.
Find solutions to other Universal Analytics vs. GA4 problems in our full list of GA4 resources.
ChatGPT traffic in the GA house! Plus new features in GA4 and understanding GTM first-party…
This article details the process of building two BigQuery tables for path analysis, with a…
Preview five great dashboards for SEO reporting and analysis, and find the one that works…