How to Create a Quarterly Sales Report in Google Analytics with AI
Pulling together a comprehensive quarterly sales report from Google Analytics can feel like a genuine chore. You know the critical insights are in there - somewhere - but digging them out requires navigating complex menus, cross-referencing multiple reports, and often exporting data to a spreadsheet just to connect the dots. The goal is to get clear answers about what drove sales, which channels performed best, and where to focus your efforts next quarter.
This guide will walk you through doing just that. We'll cover the traditional method of building your report directly within Google Analytics 4, and then show you a powerful, conversational approach using AI that turns hours of work into a few simple questions.
Why Your Quarterly Sales Report Matters
Before diving into the "how," it's worth revisiting the "why." A well-made quarterly sales report does more than just show you a revenue number, it tells a story about your business performance and helps answer critical questions like:
Overall Performance: How much revenue did we generate this quarter, and how does it compare to the previous quarter or the same quarter last year?
Channel Effectiveness: Which marketing channels (e.g., Organic Search, Paid Social, Email, Direct) contributed the most sales? Where is our return on ad spend (ROAS) strongest?
Top Performing Products: What are our best-selling products or services? Are there any unexpected trends in what customers are buying?
Customer Behavior: What path do users take before making a purchase? Where in the funnel are we losing potential customers?
Goal Progression: Are we on track to hit our annual sales targets based on this quarter's performance?
Answering these questions consistently is fundamental to growing your business intelligently. Without this data, you're just guessing where to invest your time and money.
The Manual Method: Building Your Report in Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 is an incredibly powerful tool, but it's not always intuitive, especially for users who were accustomed to the simplicity of Universal Analytics. Its event-based model means compiling a straightforward sales report involves pulling information from several different places.
Breaking Down the Challenge
The main difficulty in GA4 is that your sales data isn't all in one pre-built, easy-to-read report. You have to act like a data detective, gathering clues from various sections of the platform - like Monetization and Acquisition reports - and then piecing them together yourself.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how you’d typically build this report manually.
Step 1: Set Your Date Range
This is the easy part. In the top-right corner of your GA4 interface, you’ll see the date range selector. Set this to cover the exact quarter you want to analyze (e.g., April 1, 2024 to June 30, 2024). Be sure to click "Apply."
Step 2: Find Your Core Ecommerce Metrics
Your first stop is the "Monetization" section in the left-hand navigation menu. This is where GA4 houses its primary ecommerce reports.
Go to Reports > Monetization > Ecommerce purchases.
This report gives you a high-level overview of metrics like Item views, Items added to cart, Items purchased, and most importantly, Item revenue.
Here you can get your top-line revenue number for the quarter.
Step 3: Analyze Your Traffic Sources
Now, you need to understand which channels drove that revenue. This requires switching to a different section.
Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > All Traffic.
By default, this report shows you data grouped by the Session default channel group (like Organic Search, Direct, Paid Social).
This report shows you users, sessions, and engagement rates for each channel, but you need to see revenue. Scroll the table to the right until you find the "Conversions" column. You need to link this to a revenue number. Often people configure an event for "purchase."
You can check how much total revenue each of these channels drove during the quarter. This is essential for understanding your marketing ROI.
Step 4: Identify Top-Selling Products
To find out what people are buying, you need to head back to the Monetization reports.
Go back to Reports > Monetization > Ecommerce purchases.
Look at the table below the main chart. You can toggle the primary dimension from Item name to Item ID or Item category to see your best-sellers from different angles.
This table will show you purchase quantity and item revenue for each product, allowing you to create a list of your top performers for the quarter.
Step 5: Stitch It All Together Outside of GA4
This is where the real manual work begins. Notice that you've had to jump between at least two different sections (Monetization and Acquisition) to get your core data. GA4 doesn’t offer a single dashboard that neatly combines channel performance with product sales out of the box.
For a deliverable quarterly report, your next step is nearly always:
Export the data from each report (usually as a CSV). You can do this by clicking the "Share this report" icon in the top right and selecting "Download File."
Open these files in Google Sheets or Excel.
Manually copy and paste the information into a summary document or a new spreadsheet.
Create your own charts, tables, and summaries to present the story for the quarter.
This process is time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to human error. Every time a colleague asks a follow-up question, you have to go back into GA4, find another report, export it, and add it to your analysis.
A Faster Way: Using AI to Build Your Sales Report
Instead of manually hunting for data and wrestling with spreadsheets, you can use conversational AI to build the same reports automatically. This shifts the process from clicking and navigating to simply asking questions in plain English.
Shifting from "Interface" to "Intent"
Modern AI-powered analytics tools connect directly to your Google Analytics account. From there, your main method of interacting with your data isn't an interface with menus and buttons, but a chat box.
You state your intent - what you want to know - and the AI acts as your data analyst, pulling the correct metrics, creating the visualizations, and presenting the answers. This completely bypasses the GA4 learning curve and the tedious task of exporting CSVs.
Examples of Conversational Prompts:
Imagine just typing questions like these and getting instant charts and tables in response:
For a high-level overview:"Create a dashboard for my Q2 sales in GA4. Include total revenue, total purchases, and conversion rate."
To understand channel performance:"Show me a pie chart of my total revenue broken down by channel for last quarter."
For drilling down into attribution:"Build a bar chart comparing traffic from Google Ads vs. traffic from Organic Search last quarter, and show me the total revenue from each channel."
To identify top products and their sources:"What were my top 10 best-selling products last quarter? Create a table showing item revenue and the primary channel that drove the most purchases for each."
With each prompt, the AI generates a 'live' visualization - not a static image. It’s part of a dynamic dashboard that is always connected to your real-time data.
The Advantages of an AI-Powered Approach
Using AI for reporting isn't just a novelty, it fundamentally changes the efficiency and depth of your analysis.
1. It Saves an Incredible Amount of Time
The manual process described above - navigating GA4, exporting CSVs, formatting spreadsheets - can eat up half a day or more, especially if you're creating a detailed quarterly review. With a conversational prompt, you can generate an entire dashboard with the same key metrics in under a minute. The Monday morning reporting scramble is truly a thing of the past.
2. You Don't Need to Be a GA4 Expert
One of the biggest hurdles with GA4 is the intimidating learning curve. With an AI approach, you don't need to memorize where reports are located or what a "Session default channel group" is. As long as you can describe what you want to know in plain language, you can get the insights you need. This makes data accessible to everyone on your team, not just the person who happens to be a GA4 power-user.
3. It Surfaces Deeper, More Connected Insights
Because AI can process and connect data from across an entire source instantly, it’s easier to ask more sophisticated questions. Querying which channels drive sales for a specific product category, for example, is much simpler with a conversational request than trying to configure custom filters and reports within GA4. It encourages curiosity because answering follow-up questions doesn't feel like a chore.
4. Reports Stay Up-to-Date Automatically
A report built manually in a spreadsheet is a static snapshot. It's outdated the moment it's created. In contrast, dashboards built through AI are live and automatically refresh with new data from Google Analytics. Your "Quarterly Sales Dashboard" can be bookmarked and checked at any time, always showing the most current information without any need for manual updates.
Final Thoughts
Creating a quarterly sales report in Google Analytics is essential for making smart business decisions. You can absolutely go the manual route by navigating the different sections of GA4, exporting multiple CSVs, and tediously stitching the data together in a spreadsheet. This process works, but it's slow and keeps insights locked away behind a complex interface.
This conversational, AI-driven approach is exactly why we built Graphed. We make it easy to connect your Google Analytics account (along with data from Shopify, HubSpot, Google Ads, and other platforms) in just a few clicks. From there, you can skip the manual report building altogether and simply ask for your sales reports in plain English. Our goal is to handle the tedious reporting work for you, freeing you up to focus on strategy and growth instead of wrestling with spreadsheets.