How to Export Custom Reports in Google Analytics

Exporting reports from Google Analytics is the perfect way to share key insights with your team, combine website data with information from other platforms, or dig deeper into the numbers using your favorite spreadsheet tool. We'll show you exactly how to customize a report in Google Analytics 4 with the specific dimensions and metrics you care about, and then export it in a few simple clicks.

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Why Bother Exporting Google Analytics Reports?

While the Google Analytics interface is powerful, pulling your data out of the platform unlocks a new level of analysis and collaboration. The most common reasons for exporting reports are to:

• Share Insights with Stakeholders: Not everyone on your team or in your company has access to Google Analytics (or needs it). Exporting a clean PDF or spreadsheet is an easy way to share performance highlights, campaign results, or traffic trends with others without giving them full access.
• Combine Data from Multiple Sources: Your website data is just one piece of the puzzle. To get the full picture, you often need to combine it with sales data from your CRM (like Salesforce), revenue data from your e-commerce platform (like Shopify), or ad spend from Facebook Ads. Exporting to a spreadsheet is the first step in manually merging these different datasets.
• Perform Deeper Analysis: For heavy-duty data crunching, nothing beats a spreadsheet. Exporting your GA data to Google Sheets or Excel lets you create custom pivot tables, build advanced formulas, and manipulate your data in ways that aren't possible directly within the GA4 interface.
• Create Custom Visualizations: While GA4’s charting is good, you might want to create visualizations that match your company's branding or specific reporting style. Exporting data lets you use tools like Excel, Google Sheets, or more advanced BI tools like Tableau and Power BI to build fully custom charts and dashboards.

Two Paths to Custom Reports in GA4

Google Analytics 4 offers two main ways to create a report you can export: you can either tweak an existing standard report or build a completely new one from scratch in the "Explore" section. We'll cover both.

Method 1: Customizing a Standard Report

This is the fastest way to get started. GA4's built-in reports are a great foundation, and you can easily customize them to better fit your needs.

Let’s say you want to see which channels are driving the most traffic and conversions to your site. The Traffic acquisition report is the perfect starting point.

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Navigate to the Report: In the left-hand navigation, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. You'll see a default report showing traffic by "Session default channel group."
2. Customize the View: Notice the little pencil icon in the top-right corner of the report labeled "Customize report." Click it.
3. Modify Report Data: A new panel will open on the right. Here you can adjust:
4. Adjust Visualizations: Under the "Charts" section, you can change the type of visual from a Line Chart to a Bar Chart, or hide it altogether if you just want a table.
5. Save Your Customized Report: Click the blue "Save" button. Crucially, you should select "Save as a new report" and give it a descriptive name like "Traffic Source and Revenue Report." This creates a new report in your Library without overwriting the default GA4 version.

Once you’ve saved it, you can easily access this custom view anytime, and as we’ll see in a moment, export it directly.

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Method 2: Building a Truly Custom Report with Explorations

For more complex questions, you'll want to head to the "Explore" section. This is GA4's sandbox for creating highly specific reports that combine dimensions and metrics in any way you can imagine.

Let's build a practical example: a report showing your top landing pages by country, along with engagement and conversion metrics.

Creating a Free-Form Exploration

1. Navigate to Explore: Click on the "Explore" tab in the left-hand navigation menu.
2. Start a New Exploration: Click on "Free form" in the template gallery. This gives you a blank canvas that looks like a pivot table.
3. Name Your Exploration: In the top left, give your exploration a clear title, like "Top Landing Pages by Country."
4. Import Your Building Blocks: The "Variables" column on the far left is where you gather your ingredients (Dimensions and Metrics).
5. Build Your Report Table: Now, drag and drop the variables into the "Tab Settings" column to build your report.

Instantly, the table on the right will populate with your data, showing your landing pages as rows, countries as columns, and your key performance metrics in the cells. You can add filters here, change the visualization type, and more. This is true ad-hoc reporting.

The Main Event: How to Export Your Report

Now that you've carefully crafted the perfect report - either by customizing a standard one or building an exploration - it's time to export it. The process is nearly identical for both.

In the top right corner of your report or exploration, you'll see a share icon (an arrow pointing up from a tray). Click on it.

You'll get an "Export Data" menu with a few options:

• Google Sheets: This is a fantastic option if you and your team work heavily in the Google ecosystem. It exports the data directly into a new Google Sheet, making it instantly shareable and ready for collaborative analysis.
• Excel (XLSX): A classic choice for offline analysis. This downloads an .xlsx file directly to your computer, ready to be opened in Microsoft Excel.
• CSV (Comma Separated Values): This is the most universal format. CSVs are lightweight, plain-text files that can be opened in any spreadsheet program or imported into another database or analytics tool. Use this if you plan on combining your GA data with other data sources.
• PDF: Perfect for creating a "snapshot" of a report to share with stakeholders who don't need to manipulate the data. It preserves the look and feel of your GA report, including any charts and tables.

Simply select your preferred format, and Google Analytics will prepare and download the file for you. That's it! You've successfully exported a custom report.

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Practical Tips for Better Analytics Workflows

Exporting reports is simple, but integrating it into an efficient workflow takes a bit more thought. Here are a few tips to save you time.

Tip 1: Save Frequently Used Explorations

If you find yourself building the same exploration over and over, make sure it has a clear name. Explorations are automatically saved in your "Explore" hub, acting as your personal library of custom reports. No need to rebuild every month.

Tip 2: Schedule Regular Email Reports

For standard and saved custom reports, you can automate delivery right to your inbox. While viewing a report, just click the "Share report" icon (the same one you use for exporting) and select "Schedule email." You can set up recurring emails on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, which is a huge time-saver for regular reporting.

Tip 3: Be Mindful of Data Sampling

For high-traffic websites or really complex explorations looking at a long date range, GA4 might use a subset of your data - called sampling - to return a report quickly. You'll see a green checkmark icon at the top of an exploration if the data is 100% complete. If it's sampled, the icon will be yellow or orange. Exporting data won't "un-sample" it, so be aware that your exported report may be based on an approximation if your query is very large or complex.

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Final Thoughts

Learning how to build and export custom reports in Google Analytics is a foundational skill for any marketer or business owner. It moves you from passively viewing default dashboards to actively asking questions of your data, pulling out the exact insights you need to share, analyze, and combine with other critical business metrics.

This manual "export and combine" process works well for one-off analyses, but it can quickly become cumbersome for ongoing, holistic reporting. To get a single view of performance, you have to log into Google Analytics, your ad platforms, your e-commerce store, and your CRM, export CSVs from each, and then manually stitch them together in a master spreadsheet every single week. At Graphed, we automate that entire frustrating workflow. We connect all your marketing and sales data sources in just a few clicks, giving you a unified, real-time view of your entire funnel. Instead of building tables by hand, you can just ask questions in plain English like, "show me a dashboard of our Facebook ad spend versus Shopify revenue by campaign," and watch it appear instantly.