How to Track User Journey in Google Analytics 4

Tracking how users navigate your website is the first step to understanding what they truly want. Google Analytics 4 gives you the tools to map out these user journeys, but finding them can feel different from what you're used to. This article will show you exactly which reports to use and how to configure them to see the complete path your visitors take, from their first click to their final conversion.

Understanding the "User Journey" in GA4

Before jumping into reports, it's important to understand a core difference in how GA4 thinks about user behavior. Universal Analytics was session-based, grouping everything a user did in one visit. GA4 is event-based, treating every single interaction - a page view, a button click, a purchase - as an individual event.

This may seem like a small change, but it's massive. It means you're no longer limited to tracking rigid, session-defined paths. Instead, you can follow a user's entire lifecycle across multiple sessions, devices, and days. The "user journey" in GA4 is less about a single-visit flowchart and more about a flexible, comprehensive story of user interaction over time.

Your Main Tool: The GA4 Exploration Reports

Forget the old "Behavior Flow" report. In GA4, your home for user journey analysis is the Explore section. This is a powerful, flexible workspace where you can build custom reports from scratch. We’ll focus on the three most important exploration templates for tracking journeys: Path Exploration, Funnel Exploration, and User Explorer.

1. Path Exploration: Visualizing User Flows

The Path Exploration report is the closest direct replacement for Universal Analytics' Behavior Flow. It helps you visualize the sequential steps users take on your site, letting you see the most common paths forward (or backward) from any given page or event.

This is perfect for answering questions like:

After landing on the homepage, where do most users go next?
What actions do people take right before they make a purchase?
Are users getting stuck in a loop between two specific pages?

How to create a Path Exploration report:

Step 1: Navigate to the Explore section

In the left-hand menu of GA4, click on Explore. On the next screen, click Path Exploration to open a new report template. It will load with some default data, which we'll now customize.

Step 2: Choose your starting point

The report needs a starting point to begin mapping the journey. You have two main options:

Start from a page: In the first column ("Step +1"), click the pencil icon or the drop-down menu that likely says "Event name." Instead, select "Page title and screen name" or "Page path and screen class." You can then select the specific page you want to analyze, like your homepage or a key landing page.
Start from an event: Alternatively, you can start the journey when a user completes a specific action. You can keep the default "session_start" event to see the path from the beginning of a session, or change it to something like "add_to_cart" to see what users do after adding a product.

Step 3: Analyze the path

Once you’ve set your starting point, GA4 will generate a flow diagram. The gray bars show the pages or events users triggered next. The thicker the bar, the more popular the path. You can click on any bar in "Step +2" to expand the path further and see "Step +3", and so on. This allows you to follow the most common user flows throughout your website.

Pro Tip: Use Backwards Pathing

Don’t just look forward! In the top left corner of your report, click "Start over" and choose the "Ending point" option. Here you can select a conversion event like "purchase" or "generate_lead" and work backward. This is incredibly powerful for seeing the primary paths that a successfully converted user took just before they acted.

2. Funnel Exploration: Tracking a Pre-defined Journey

Sometimes, you don't want to see every possible path, you want to see how successfully users complete a specific path you designed, like a checkout process or a sign-up flow. This is what the Funnel Exploration report is built for.

This report helps you answer critical questions such as:

At which step of our checkout process do most people drop off?
What percentage of users who start our free trial setup actually complete it?
Are mobile users more likely to abandon the funnel than desktop users?

Whereas Path Exploration is about discovery, Funnel Exploration is about measurement.

How to create a Funnel Exploration report:

Step 1: Open a new funnel report

In the Explore section, click on the Funnel Exploration template. Again, GA4 provides a sample, which we'll customize.

Step 2: Define your funnel steps

In the "Tab Settings" column on the left, you'll see a section called Steps. This is where you build the ideal journey you want to track. Click the pencil icon to edit.

Here you'll define each sequential step. For an e-commerce checkout flow, your steps might look like this:

Condition: view_item (User views a product page)
Condition: add_to_cart (User clicks the 'Add to Cart' button)
Condition: begin_checkout (User starts the checkout process)
Condition: add_shipping_info (User submits shipping information)
Condition: purchase (User completes the purchase)

You can define steps using events, page views, or a combination. The key is to list them in the order a user is expected to complete them.

Step 3: Analyze funnel performance

Once you click "Apply," GA4 generates a bar chart visualizing the funnel. It shows you the total number of users who completed each step and, more importantly, the percentage who dropped off between steps. That big red bar showing a huge abandonment rate? That’s where you need to focus your optimization efforts.

Use the "Breakdown" dimension to segment your funnel. Drag "Device category" into the Breakdown box to see whether mobile or desktop users drop off more frequently at certain steps. This helps pinpoint technical issues or design flaws for specific user groups.

3. User Explorer: Digging Into Individual Journeys

Sometimes, high-level trends aren't enough. You need to see exactly what an individual (but still anonymous) user did on your site to understand why they converted or where they got stuck. The User Explorer report lets you do this.

You can find it under Reports > Explore > User Explorer.

This report lists individual users by a scrambled Client ID or User-ID. Clicking on any user ID reveals a detailed timeline of every event they've triggered, page they've viewed, and conversion they have completed across all their sessions. While you can't see personal information, you can analyze behavior patterns. For example, you might notice that a high-value customer visited the pricing page five times over a three-week period before finally making a purchase. This kind of individual insight is incredibly valuable for marketing attribution and user experience improvements.

Beyond GA4 Reports: Connecting Data for a True Journey Map

GA4 gives you a fantastic view of what happens on your website, but the true user journey often starts long before a user lands on your homepage and continues afterward in a CRM.

Acquisition Channels: Did the journey start with a Google ad, a Facebook post, or an organic search? Use the "Traffic Acquisition" report (under Reports > Acquisition) to find your top-performing channels, then use "Session source / medium" as a dimension in your Path and Funnel Explorations to see if users from different sources behave differently.
Event Parameters: To get the most out of your journey mapping, you need clean data. Make sure you are using custom event parameters to add context to your events. For a "download_paper" event, for example, you should also pass along a "paper_title" parameter so you can analyze which whitepapers are driving the most high-intent actions.
UTM Tracking: Your journey analysis is only as good as your traffic source data. Enforce consistent campaign UTM tagging across all marketing efforts so you can accurately filter your journeys by source or campaign to prove ROI accurately.

Final Thoughts

Mapping the user journey in GA4 requires a shift in thinking from rigid, pre-built reports to flexible, custom explorations. By mastering Path Exploration for discovery, Funnel Exploration for measurement, and the User Explorer for deep dives, you can stitch together a far more accurate and actionable story of how people interact with your business.

We know that pulling all of this information together from different tools can still become a huge time sink. We created Graphed because we spent too many Monday mornings manually downloading reports from GA4, Facebook Ads, and our CRM just to figure out what was actually working. With Graphed, you can simply ask, "Show me the top user paths from Facebook campaigns that led to a sale last week," and get a complete, real-time dashboard instantly. This lets you spend your time on insights and strategy, not wrangling data in spreadsheets.