How to Create a Daily Report in Google Analytics
Checking your website’s performance daily is a powerful habit for staying ahead of trends and catching issues before they become problems. Forget complex setups, this guide will walk you through creating and automating a simple, effective daily report in Google Analytics 4. You'll learn how to build your report, schedule it for email delivery, and make it a useful part of your routine.
Why Check a Daily Report?
In a fast-moving business, a week is a long time to wait for data. A daily check-in isn't about deep, exhaustive analysis. It's about taking a quick pulse of your website's health. The goal is to quickly spot trends, fix problems, and make timely adjustments in a couple of minutes each morning.
Here’s why it’s so effective:
Catch Errors Fast: Did a new website deployment break your conversion tracking? Did traffic suddenly drop to zero? A daily report lets you spot technical issues immediately, not during your weekly team meeting when it's too late.
Monitor Campaign Performance: When you launch a new ad campaign, email blast, or social media promotion, you want to know if it's working now. A daily report shows you the immediate impact, allowing you to double down on what works or pivot away from what doesn't.
Identify Positive Trends: Did an article suddenly go viral? Is a new traffic source sending high-quality visitors? Spotting these positive trends early allows you to capitalize on them before the momentum is lost.
What to Include in Your Daily Google Analytics Report
A good daily report is concise. You don’t need every metric under the sun, you just need a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) to give you a snapshot of what happened yesterday. Overloading your report with too much data defeats the purpose of a quick, scannable update.
Start with these essential metrics:
Users: How many unique individuals visited your site? This helps you understand the size of your audience.
Sessions: How many times was your site visited? A single user can have multiple sessions. This metric is great for measuring overall traffic volume.
Engagement Rate: What percentage of sessions lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least two pageviews? This is GA4's replacement for Bounce Rate and tells you if your visitors are actually interacting with your content.
Conversions: How many times did users complete a desired action? This could be a purchase, a form submission (like "generate_lead"), or a newsletter signup. This is arguably the most important metric for most businesses.
Traffic by Source / Medium: Where did your traffic come from? (e.g., google / organic, facebook / cpc, direct / (none)). This helps you see which channels are driving results.
You can also add other dimensions or metrics depending on your goals, such as Page path to see your top pages or Event count for specific actions, but the list above is a perfect starting point for almost any website.
How to Create a Daily Report in Google Analytics 4
GA4 encourages customization. While there isn't a pre-built "Daily Report," you can easily create and save one that meets your exact needs. We'll use the "Reports" section for this, as it's the most straightforward method for creating reusable reports.
Step 1: Navigate to the Reports Library
Log into your Google Analytics 4 property. In the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports. At the very bottom of the reports menu, you'll see an icon for Library. Click it.
This is where all standard and custom reports are stored. Think of it as your command center for reporting.
Step 2: Create a New Detail Report
In the Library, click the blue + Create new report button. From the dropdown, select Create detail report. This type of report gives you a standard data table with a couple of charts, which is perfect for a daily summary.
You have two options: start from a blank slate or use a template. For simplicity, let's use a template. Under "Traffic," select the Traffic acquisition template and GA will pre-populate some useful dimensions and metrics for you.
Step 3: Customize Your Report's Dimensions and Metrics
Now you’re in the report builder. On the right-hand panel, you can customize everything.
Under "Dimensions":
This is what you'll use to break down your data. The template starts with some good defaults, like Session source / medium. Click + Add dimension to include others you might want, such as:
Landing page + query string
Device category
Country
You can also set a "default" dimension for the report. For a daily overview, Session source / medium is a great choice.
Under "Metrics":
This is an important step. Click the "Metrics" tab in the right-hand panel. The template will have several metrics already, but you can remove what you don't need by clicking the "x" and add what you do. Click + Add metric and add the key metrics we discussed earlier:
Users
Sessions
Engagement rate
Conversions (you can also select a specific conversion event if you have multiples)
Once you've added your desired metrics, you can drag and drop them to reorder them. Placing your most important metric - like Conversions - first often makes sense.
Step 4: Save and Name Your Report
Once you are happy with your setup, click the blue Save button in the top right corner. A dialog box will appear, asking you to name your report. Call it something intuitive like "Daily Performance Report" or "Daily Snapshot."
Step 5: Add the Report to Your Navigation
After saving, you’ll be sent back to the library. Your new report is created but isn't visible in the main navigation yet. Find your chosen report menu (typically under Life Cycle > Acquisition), and click Edit collection.
Find your newly created "Daily Performance Report" on the right side and drag it into the desired section on the left. Click Save to confirm. Now, your custom report will appear in your regular navigation menu for easy, one-click access every day.
Automating Your Daily Report Delivery via Email
Creating the report is great, but remembering to check it every day can be a challenge. The easiest way to stay consistent is to have it automatically delivered to your inbox.
Here’s how to set up daily email delivery for your new report:
Navigate to your saved "Daily Performance Report" from the left-hand menu.
Set the date range in the top right to Yesterday. This is important - it ensures the emailed report always shows yesterday's data.
In the top right corner of the report, look for the Share this report icon (a box with an arrow pointing out). Click it.
A dropdown will appear. Select Share report. A panel will open on the right.
Click the Schedule email switch to turn it on. This will reveal the scheduling options.
Under "Recipients," add your email address and the email addresses of any team members who need to see the report.
Under "Frequency," select Daily.
Click OK and your daily report is now scheduled. You will receive a PDF attached to an email every morning with the data for the previous day. Sit back and wait for the insights to arrive!
One key limitation to remember: GA4's scheduled email system sends a static file (like a PDF or CSV). It’s not an interactive, live dashboard. It's excellent for a quick glance, but for deeper dives or modifying your view, you'll still need to log into GA4.
When Should You Go Beyond a Simple Daily Report?
A daily report is your go-to for quick checks, but your company's data story has many more chapters. While helpful for a morning pulse-check, you will eventually outgrow its simple, static format. Marketers and business owners eventually need answers that a simple Looker report won’t cover efficiently. As your business grows, you’ll start asking more complex questions, combining data from Google Analytics with other apps your business runs on: a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot, your Shopify store, Google Ads, or Facebook Ads. Trying to combine these manually is where many businesses can become bogged down with analysis paralysis and hours of exporting data and wrangling spreadsheets.
Final Thoughts
Setting up a custom daily report in Google Analytics 4 is a straightforward process that makes a huge impact. By creating a saved report focused on your key metrics and scheduling it for daily email delivery, you create a powerful habit for monitoring performance, catching issues early, and making smarter, data-informed decisions in just a few minutes each day.
But native reporting inside individual tools like Google Analytics can feel limiting. We also understand the frustration of trying to connect the dots between your website traffic in GA, your ad spend in Facebook Ads, and your sales data in Shopify. That inspired us to build Graphed. It's an AI data analyst that brings all your marketing and sales data into one place. Instead of spending hours building reports, you can simply ask questions in plain English - like "Show me a dashboard of my marketing channels from GA4, their ad cost from Google Ads, and total revenue Shopify" - and instantly create a real-time, interactive dashboard that keeps itself updated.