How to Use Google Analytics

Jumping into Google Analytics for the first time can feel like opening the cockpit of an airplane - tons of switches, dials, and dashboards. But you don't need to be a data scientist to get valuable insights from it. This guide will walk you through navigating the GA4 interface, understanding the reports that really matter, and using them to answer your most important business questions.

First, A Quick Note on GA4

If you've used Google Analytics before, you might notice your new account looks very different. That's because Google has completely rebuilt it from the ground up, moving from the old "Universal Analytics" (UA) to "Google Analytics 4". The main difference to understand is the new data model.

Universal Analytics (Old): Was built around sessions and pageviews. It grouped all user activity into a "session" (a visit).
Google Analytics 4 (New): Is built around events. Everything is an event - a page view, a button click, a purchase, a scroll down the page. This model is more flexible and gives you a much better understanding of the entire user journey, not just what pages they looked at.

While this change introduces a learning curve, it also makes GA4 much more powerful once you get the hang of it. We'll be focusing entirely on the GA4 interface.

Finding Your Way Around the GA4 Dashboard

When you log in to GA4, you'll see a navigation menu on the left side. Don't let all the options intimidate you. For now, you only need to focus on a few key areas.

The Main Sections to Know:

Home: This is a high-level summary dashboard that GA creates for you. It pulls in cards with top-level stats like your total users, traffic sources, and most popular pages. It's a great place for a quick daily check-in.
Reports: This is where you'll spend most of your time. It’s home to all the standard, pre-built reports that cover your audience, traffic acquisition, user engagement, and revenue. Think of it as your daily driver for reporting.
Explore: This is the advanced section for building custom reports and doing deep-dive analysis. Once you’re comfortable with the standard reports, the Explore hub lets you create visualizations like funnels, path explorations, and free-form tables to answer very specific questions.
Advertising: This area helps you understand the performance of your paid campaigns and attribution. It connects data from your Google Ads account to show you how different touchpoints contribute to conversions.

The Core Reports You Actually Need

Click on the "Reports" icon in the left menu. This is your command center. Inside, you'll find collections of reports broken out logically. Here are the most essential ones to master first.

Reports > Acquisition: Where Are People Coming From?

The Acquisition reports answer one of the most fundamental marketing questions: "How are people finding us?"

Traffic acquisition: This is the most useful report in this section. It shows you the sources of traffic for each session. You’ll see data broken down by "Session default channel group" (like Organic Search, Direct, Paid Social, Email) and "Session source / medium" (like google / organic, facebook.com / social, etc.). Use this report to see which channels are driving the most sessions, engaged users, and conversions.
User acquisition: This report looks similar, but with one key difference: it focuses on the source that brought a user to your site for the very first time. This helps you understand which channels are best at acquiring entirely new customers.

Key takeaway: Spend your time in the Traffic acquisition report to understand which marketing channels are consistently driving visitors and results.

Reports > Engagement: What Are People Doing on Your Site?

Once users arrive, the next big question is: "What are they doing?" The Engagement reports tell this story.

Events: This report lists every event being tracked on your property. By default, GA4 automatically tracks events like page_view, session_start, first_visit, and scroll. You can click on any event name to get more detail about it. If you've set up custom events (like tracking video plays or form submissions), they'll also appear here.
Pages and screens: This is one of the most valuable reports. It shows you which pages on your site get the most views. More importantly, it also shows "Average engagement time," helping you see which content actually holds your audience's attention. Is that blog post you spent 20 hours writing actually getting read? This report has the answer.
Conversions: You must tell GA which events are important to your business by marking them as "conversions." Common conversions include a purchase, a lead form submission (like generate_lead), or signing up for a trial. This report isolates just those key events so you can see how often they happen and which channels are driving them.

In GA4, “Engaged sessions” have replaced "Bounce Rate" as the primary engagement metric. An engaged session is one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews. Your "Engagement rate" is simply the percentage of sessions that were engaged. High engagement rate = a good thing!

Reports > Monetization: How Does Your Site Generate Revenue?

If you run an e-commerce store or sell anything directly on your site, this section is for you. It tracks revenue data tied to events like purchase, add_to_cart, and begin_checkout. You can see your best-selling items, total revenue, and how revenue breaks down over time.

Practical Guide: Answering Key Business Questions with GA4

Now let's put it all together. Here’s how to use these reports to answer three common questions.

Question 1: "Where is my most valuable traffic coming from?"

Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
The default view shows you data by "Session default channel group." This gives you a high-level view (e.g., Organic Search is driving 10 conversions).
To dig deeper, click the dropdown above the first column and select Session source / medium. This gives you more specific data (e.g., google / organic, bing / organic).
Look at the far right columns for Conversions and/or Total revenue. Sort the table by one of these columns by clicking its header.
The Insight: You might discover that while Paid Social drives a lot of traffic (sessions), Organic Search drives more actual conversions. This tells you where to invest your time and budget.

Question 2: "What is my most popular and engaging content?"

Navigate to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens.
By default, the table is sorted by "Views." The pages at the top are your most popular ones.
Now, click the header for the Average engagement time column to re-sort the table.
The Insight: You might find a blog post that doesn't get the most views but has a very high average engagement time. This means the people who are finding it are reading it thoroughly. That's a strong signal telling you to create more content on that topic or to promote that post more heavily.

Question 3: "Is my new email campaign working?"

To track campaigns effectively, you need to use UTM parameters. These are tags you add to the end of a URL to tell Google Analytics exactly where the click came from. For example, a link in your newsletter might look like this:

www.yoursite.com/blog/new-post?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=holiday_sale

When someone clicks that link, GA4 automatically logs those utm tags.

Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
Click the little plus icon (+) next to the primary dimension dropdown.
In the search box that appears, type "campaign" and select Session campaign.
The Insight: You will now see a new column showing the campaign names you’ve set in your URLs. This allows you to isolate the traffic and conversions specifically from your "holiday_sale" campaign, proving whether or not it was successful.

Beyond the Basics: Your First Exploration Report

Standard reports are great, but what if you want to see your data from a completely custom angle? That's what the "Explore" section is for.

Let's say you want to find out which cities drive the most revenue. You can't see this in a standard report, but you can build it in seconds with a "Free form" exploration.

Click Explore in the left-hand navigation and select Free form.
On the left panel, you'll see "Variables." Click the + icon next to "Dimensions."
Search for and check the box next to City. Click "Import."
Now click the + icon next to "Metrics." Search for and import Total revenue and Users.
Drag the City dimension from the Variables panel and drop it onto the "Rows" box in the "Tab Settings" panel.
Drag the Total revenue and Users metrics and drop them onto the "Values" box.

Instantly, the canvas on the right will populate with a table showing users and revenue for every city. This is just a simple example, but explorations let you slice and dice your data in almost any way you can imagine.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics 4 is an incredibly robust tool for understanding your audience and measuring what works. By mastering the core Acquisition and Engagement reports, you can get clear answers about where your traffic comes from and what content resonates most, while the Explore Hub unlocks deeper, more custom analysis.

While GA4 is essential for website analytics, we know it's often just one of dozens of platforms you use to run your business. That's why we built Graphed. Our platform connects all your data sources - including Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, and your CRM - into a single place. Rather than hunting through reports, you can just ask questions in plain English like, "Show me which Facebook campaigns drove the most Shopify sales last month" and get an answer, a chart, or a full dashboard in seconds.