How to See Customer Journey in Google Analytics 4

Seeing the full customer journey in Google Analytics 4 can feel tricky, especially if you're used to the old Universal Analytics reports. But GA4's event-based model is actually built to give you a much clearer picture of how users navigate from their first touchpoint to their final conversion. This guide will walk you through the key reports and techniques you can use to map out your customer's path using GA4’s powerful exploration tools.

What Exactly is a "Customer Journey" in GA4?

In digital marketing, the customer journey is the complete story of a user's interaction with your brand - from the initial moment they become aware of you to the point they become a loyal, repeat customer. Traditionally, this is broken down into stages like awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention.

Google Analytics 4 is fundamentally different from its predecessor, Universal Analytics (UA), and this difference makes it better equipped to track a modern customer journey. Here’s why:

UA was Session-Based: Universal Analytics centered around "sessions," which were single visits to your site. This made it difficult to connect the dots if a user visited your blog on their phone one day, came back on their laptop a week later to view a product, and finally purchased from a tablet. It might have looked like three separate, unrelated visits.
GA4 is Event-Based: GA4 revolves around "events" and "users." Every action a user takes, from a page_view to a scroll or a purchase, is an event. GA4 stitches these events together into a continuous timeline for each user, even across different devices and sessions. This gives you a true, user-centric view of their entire journey, not just isolated visits.

This user-focused, event-driven approach means you're no longer just analyzing website visits, you're analyzing human behavior over time.

Key GA4 Reports for Visualizing the Customer Journey

GA4's power for journey mapping lives within its "Explore" section. While standard reports give you high-level summaries, the exploration reports let you dig deep into user behavior paths. Let's look at the most useful ones.

1. Path Exploration: See the Routes Users Actually Take

The Path Exploration report is your go-to tool for visualizing the unstructured, free-form paths users take through your website or app. It creates a tree-like graph that shows you what users did immediately before or after a specific event or page view.

This report is perfect for answering questions like:

"What are the most common pages people visit after landing on our homepage?"
"From our most popular blog post, where do users go next?"
"What actions do people take right before uninstalling our app?"

How to Create a Path Exploration Report

Creating one of these reports is straightforward once you know where to look.

From the left-hand navigation in GA4, click on Explore.
Select Path exploration from the template gallery or start with a blank exploration.
You'll see a panel with two main sections: a visualization area on the right and a settings/variables panel on the left.
Choose a Starting or Ending Point:
- To see paths moving forward, drag a starting point into the "Starting point" box. Common choices are dimensions like Event name or Page path and screen class. Let's say you choose Event name and select session_start.
- To see paths in reverse (i.e., backwards from a conversion), click "Start over" in the top right and then select an "Ending point." This is great for seeing the most common paths that lead to a purchase event.
Analyze the Path: GA4 will generate a flow diagram. The first column is your starting point. The second column ("Step +1") shows all the events or pages that immediately followed, with the most common paths at the top. You can click on any node in the steps to continue expanding that specific path further down the line to see "Step +2," "Step +3," and so on.

For example, if you set the starting point as your pricing page, Step +1 might show you that 60% of users went to a "Request a Demo" page, 20% went back to the homepage, and 10% went to a "feature comparison" page. This insight is incredibly valuable for optimizing your page flow.

2. Funnel Exploration: Analyze Pre-Defined Journeys

Where Path Exploration is about discovery, Funnel Exploration is about measurement. You use this report to analyze how well users are progressing through a specific, pre-determined journey you've defined, like a checkout process or a user onboarding sequence.

Use it to answer critical questions such as:

"What's the drop-off rate at each step of our checkout funnel?"
"How many users who sign up for a trial actually complete the onboarding tutorial?"
"Which marketing channels bring in users who are most likely to complete our lead generation form?"

How to Create a Funnel Exploration Report

Funnel reports are essential for identifying friction points in your key conversion paths.

Go to Explore and select Funnel exploration.
In the "Tab Settings" column on the left, you’ll see a "Steps" section. This is where you define your funnel. Click the pencil icon to edit.
For each step, define the condition a user must meet. This is typically done with the Event name dimension. For example, a simple e-commerce checkout funnel might look like this:
- Step 1: Event name is exactly view_item
- Step 2: Event name is exactly add_to_cart
- Step 3: Event name is exactly begin_checkout
- Step 4: Event name is exactly purchase
Click Apply in the top right. GA4 will build the visualization. The most valuable chart is the bar chart that shows the number of users who completed each step and the percentage who dropped off between steps. If you see a massive drop-off between add_to_cart and begin_checkout, you know you have a problem to investigate on your cart page.

What’s more, you can apply a "Breakdown" dimension to see how different segments behave. For example, you can break down the funnel by Device category to see if your checkout process performs worse on mobile than on desktop.

3. User Explorer: Dive into Individual User Journeys

The standard and exploration reports show you aggregated data, but the User Explorer shows you the activity of individual users on your site. This is like having a microscope to zoom in on a specific person's journey, which is invaluable for debugging issues or understanding the unique behavior of your most valuable customers.

To use it, go to Explore and create a report with the User explorer technique. You'll see a list of users identified by their anonymous "App-instance ID" or "Client ID." Clicking on any ID reveals a full, chronological timeline of every event that user has triggered.

This is useful when you want to:

Troubleshoot bugs: See the exact sequence of events that led a user to an error message.
Analyze high-value customers: Look at the entire journey of a user who made a large purchase. What blog posts did they read? How many times did they visit before buying?
Understand abandonment: Trace the path of a user who added items to their cart but then left. What was the last thing they did on your site?

You can’t see personally identifiable information, but you can see the detailed behavior streams that make up the "why" behind your aggregated data.

Putting It All Together: Pro Tips for Journey Analysis

Knowing how the reports work is half the battle. Here are a few tips to get more meaningful insights from your analysis.

Set Up Goals with Custom Conversions and Events

GA4's power is unlocked by the events you track. While it automatically tracks events like page_view and session_start, you should configure custom events for every meaningful action on your site. Examples include:

newsletter_signup
request_demo
video_start
form_submission_success

The more relevant events you track, the more granular your path and funnel explorations will be, allowing you to build much more detailed and useful customer journey maps.

Use Comparisons and Segments For Deeper Insights

The real story often lies in the differences between user groups. In any of your exploration reports, you can add "Comparisons" or "Segments" to analyze the behavior of specific cohorts. For example:

Compare the funnel completion rate for users from Organic Search vs. Paid Search.
Look at the path exploration for users on Mobile vs. Desktop.
Create a segment of users who have made a purchase and see how their behavior differs from non-purchasers.

This is how you move from just seeing what’s happening to understanding why it's happening and for which audiences.

Start with a Specific Question

The path exploration report, in particular, can be overwhelming. Instead of opening it and just clicking around aimlessly, start your analysis with a clear business question. For instance:

"What is the most effective path from our homepage to a contact form submission?"
"I see the conversion rate on our new landing page is low. Where are visitors going instead of converting?"

Having a specific question will guide your use of the tools and ensure you find actionable - not just interesting - data.

Final Thoughts

Mastering customer journey analysis in Google Analytics 4 is about shifting from a session-based mindset to a user-centric one. By leveraging the Path, Funnel, and User exploration reports, you can piece together a clear and detailed picture of how users interact with your business, pinpoint friction, and optimize their experience for better results.

We know that even with GA4's improved tools, assembling this data can be time-consuming. We built Graphed to simplify this process. By connecting your Google Analytics account, you can skip the complex report setup and just ask - in plain English - questions like "Show me a funnel report for users who came from Facebook ads" or "What are the top 5 pages people visit after reading our last blog post?" We instantly build the dashboard for you, blending data from GA4 and all your other tools to give you an even more complete view of the full customer journey.