How to Create a Quarterly Report in Google Analytics

Tracking your website’s performance every 90 days gives you the perfect high-level view to spot meaningful trends and make smarter strategic decisions. This guide will walk you through exactly how to build a comprehensive quarterly report using Google Analytics 4, from choosing the right metrics to visualizing your data for actionable insights.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Thinking in Quarters: Why 90 Days Matters

Daily or even weekly data can be noisy. A random traffic spike or a slow sales day can cause you to overreact. Monthly reports are better, but a quarterly view zooms out just enough to smooth out the anomalies and reveal the bigger picture. It aligns perfectly with business planning, allowing your team to assess performance against goals and set new priorities for the upcoming quarter.

A good quarterly report doesn’t just show what happened, it helps you understand why it happened and what you should do next. It is your strategic guide for validating your marketing efforts, identifying opportunities for growth, and spotting potential problems before they become serious.

First, Define Your Story: Key Metrics for Your Quarterly Report

Before diving into GA4, you need to decide what questions you want to answer. A report filled with random metrics is just clutter. Your goal is to tell a clear and concise story about your website's performance. Organize your metrics into a logical flow, walking your stakeholders from how people found you to what they did on your site.

Here are the core categories to build your report around:

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

1. Acquisition: How Did People Find You?

This section answers the fundamental question: "Where is our traffic coming from?" It helps you understand which marketing channels are most effective at driving visitors to your site.

• Users and New Users: This shows the total number of unique visitors and how many of them were visiting for the first time. A healthy balance indicates you're both attracting a new audience and retaining your existing one.
• Sessions: The total number of visits to your site. A user can have multiple sessions. This metric is a general gauge of traffic volume.
• Sessions by Channel Grouping: This is the most important acquisition metric. It breaks down your traffic by source, such as Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, and Social. It tells you which channels are your workhorses.

2. Engagement: What Did They Do?

Once visitors land on your site, are they sticking around? This section reveals how compelling your content and user experience are.

• Engaged Sessions: This GA4 metric counts visits that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least two pageviews. It’s a great curation of what GA considers a “good” visit.
• Engagement Rate: The percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions. This is the new "Bounce Rate" and tells you what portion of your audience is genuinely interacting with your site. A higher rate is better.
• Average Engagement Time: The average time your webpage was in the foreground of a user's browser. It helps you understand if people are actually consuming your content.
• Views by Page: Identifies your most popular pages and landing pages. This is crucial for understanding what content resonates most with your audience.

3. Conversion: Did They Accomplish Your Goals?

This is the bottom line. It measures whether visitors are taking the valuable actions you want them to take, from making a purchase to filling out a form.

• Conversions: The total number of times users completed a goal (e.g., form_submission, purchase, sign_up). You must configure these as conversion events in GA4 first.
• Conversion Rate (Manual Calculation): While GA4 has a "Session conversion rate," calculating it simply as (Conversions / Sessions) × 100 gives you a straightforward performance benchmark.
• Total Revenue: If you run an e-commerce store, this is your most important metric, showing the total revenue generated from sales.

How to Build Your Report in GA4: Two Simple Methods

Now that you know what to measure, let’s get into the how. GA4 offers two excellent ways to create your report: standard custom reports for a clear overview, and the more advanced Explore tool for deeper analysis.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Method 1: Using Custom Reports (The Easy Way)

For a straightforward, shareable report, the ‘Reports’ section is your best bet. This method involves creating and saving a custom report that you can easily access each quarter.

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Navigate to the Library: In your GA4 property, click on Reports in the left-hand navigation. At the very bottom of this menu, you’ll see Library. Click it.
2. Create a New Report: In the library, click the + Create new report button, then select Create detail report from the dropdown.
3. Choose a Template: GA4 provides useful templates to get you started. The Traffic acquisition template is perfect for a quarterly overview. Select it.
4. Customize Your Report: This is where you tailor the report to your needs.
5. Save Your Report: Click the blue Save button in the top right. Give it a clear name like "Quarterly Performance Summary" and click Save again.
6. Add it to Your Reporting Menu: Now, go back to the Library. You will see your newly saved report there. Find the "Life cycle" collection card and click Edit collection. On the right, find your "Quarterly Performance Summary" report and drag it under the Acquisition tab. Click Save > Save changes to current collection.

Your custom report will now permanently appear in your main "Reports" navigation, ready for you to access anytime.

Method 2: Using the Explore Tool (For Deeper Insights)

The ‘Explore’ tool is where you can go beyond standard reports to build more advanced tables and visualizations. Let's create a report showing your top landing pages and how different channels bring traffic to them.

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Start an Exploration: In the left-hand navigation, click Explore and then choose Free form.
2. Import Your Dimensions and Metrics: This is where you "load" the data you want to use. In the "Variables" column on the left:
3. Construct Your Table: Now, drag and drop the imported variables into the "Tab Settings" column.

GA4 will instantly generate a detailed table showing each landing page, with traffic and conversion data broken down by channel. This is incredibly powerful for understanding which content is most effective at converting traffic from specific sources, like Organic Search versus Paid Social. You can name your Exploration (e.g., "Quarterly Landing Page Performance") and it will be saved automatically.

Don't Forget Context: How to Add Quarter-over-Quarter Comparisons

A report on a single quarter is useful, but comparing it to the previous quarter is what creates actionable insights. It helps you see if you're growing, shrinking, or stagnating.

Adding this is easy in either of the methods above:

1. Click on the date range in the top right corner of your report screen.
2. Select your desired quarter (e.g., "Last quarter" or manually select Jan 1-Mar 31).
3. At the bottom-left of the calendar pop-up, toggle on the switch that says Compare.
4. Choose Preceding period to automatically select the previous quarter’s date range, or manually select the preceding quarter. Click Apply.

Now, your GA4 report will show every metric with a corresponding percentage change, indicating where you’re improving and where you need to focus your attention next quarter.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Beyond the Numbers: Adding Narrative to Your Report

Numbers themselves don't provide insights. Your quarterly report shouldn't just be a spreadsheet with Google Analytics logos. The most important part is the narrative you wrap around the data to provide context, explain the "so what," and recommend next steps for your team.

Include these sections in your summary or document:

• What Worked?: Highlight the channels, campaigns, or content that overperformed. Did your organic search traffic grow by 30%? Why? Did a specific paid ad campaign drive a disproportionate number of conversions? Call out your wins.
• What Didn't Work?: On the flipside, be honest about the areas where you fell short. Why did your Social traffic fall off a cliff? Why is the Engagement Rate on a certain page so low? Identifying the weak spots allows you to optimize them next quarter.
• What Did We Learn?: This is the "so what" factor. Connect the dots. Did your SEO efforts from six months ago pay off with an increase in organic traffic and conversions? This is where you turn data into insights.
• What Are Our Next Steps?: The final step is turning hindsight into foresight. Based on what you learned, recommend specific action items for the next quarter. Do you need to allocate more budget to Paid Search? Should you launch a new content campaign based on your top-performing pages?

Your goal is to move from reporting the past to planning for the future.

Final Thoughts

Building a detailed quarterly report from scratch in Google Analytics is all about choosing the right metrics, using either the 'Reports' or 'Explore' tool to visualize your data, and most importantly, adding narrative context to translate numbers into actionable insights.

Taking the time to pull these reports manually every quarter is a game-changer, but it's still a process, especially when you need to combine GA4 data with other sources like your ad platforms or your CRM. At Graphed , we built our tool to solve this exact problem. In a few clicks, you can connect Google Analytics and just ask in plain English, "Show me a dashboard of a quarter-over-quarter comparison for my key acquisition and conversion metrics," and get a live, automated report in seconds. It allows us to focus on the insights, not the manual report-building.