How to Use Google Analytics 4 Google Analytics

Switching to Google Analytics 4 can feel like learning a whole new language, especially if you were comfortable with the old Universal Analytics. Instead of familiar metrics like bounce rate, you're greeted with concepts like engaged sessions and an entirely event-based model. This guide breaks down exactly how to use GA4, showing you where to find the data that matters and how to build simple, effective reports from scratch.

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Understanding the Big Change: From Universal Analytics to GA4

The biggest shift in Google Analytics 4 is its data model. Universal Analytics (UA) was built around sessions and pageviews. Each time a visitor came to your site, a session started, and you could track the pages they viewed within that session. It was great for simple websites but less effective at tracking complex user journeys across websites and mobile apps.

GA4, on the other hand, is built around events and users. In this new model, everything a user does is considered an event. Visiting a page is a page_view event. Scrolling down the page is a scroll event. Clicking a button is a click event. This event-based structure gives you a far more flexible and detailed way to understand how users actually interact with your site, beyond just which pages they visited.

While this is a powerful upgrade, it also means the reports and navigation have changed significantly. Let's get you oriented.

Navigating the GA4 Interface: Your Tour Guide

When you log in to GA4, your primary navigation is the left-hand menu. For most day-to-day analysis, you'll spend your time in just two or three of these main sections.

• Home: This is a dashboard that gives you a high-level, personally customized overview of your site's performance, including user trends, traffic spikes, and top-performing pages.
• Reports: This is where you'll find all the pre-built, standard reports. It's the best place to start for answers to common questions about traffic sources, user engagement, and audience demographics.
• Explore: This is GA4's custom reporting engine. When the standard reports aren't enough, you can come here to build your own funnels, path explorations, and free-form tables to dig deeper into the data.
• Advertising: This section is dedicated to understanding campaign performance and attribution models, helping you know which marketing channels deserve credit for conversions.
• Configure: The technical heart of GA4. Here is where you manage your events, set up conversions, and define audiences for remarketing.
• Admin: This is where you manage property and account settings, link other Google products like Google Ads, and control user access.

Right now, let's focus on the essentials: the standard Reports and the custom Explore sections.

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Finding the Essential Data: Key Standard Reports

The Reports section is organized into collections like "Acquisition" and "Engagement" to help you quickly answer a specific type of question. Here are the most important reports you'll need daily.

Reports Snapshot and Realtime

The Reports Snapshot is the default 'dashboard of dashboards.' It presents summary cards from all the different report collections, giving you a bird's-eye view of your traffic, engagement, and revenue. You can customize this layout to show the data you care about most.

The Realtime report shows you what's happening on your site in the last 30 minutes. It's fantastic for checking if tracking is working properly after a new launch or monitoring immediate interest after sending an email or social media post.

Acquisition Reports (How You Get Visitors)

This is where you answer the question, "Where is my traffic coming from?" GA4 splits this into two reports, and it's important to understand the difference.

• User acquisition: This report is based on the first time you acquired a user. If someone first found your site through an organic Google search and then came back later through an email link, they'd still be credited to Organic Search in this report. It's useful for understanding which channels are best at bringing in new people.
• Traffic acquisition: This report is based on the session level. Using the same example, the first visit would be credited to 'Organic Search' and the second visit would be credited to 'Email.' This report is your go-to for analyzing the performance of specific, current campaigns.

In both reports, look at the Session default channel group to see broad channels like 'Organic Search,' 'Direct,' 'Paid Search,' and 'Social.'

Engagement Reports (What Visitors Do)

This collection helps you understand how people interact with your content.

• Engagement overview: Get a summary of key metrics like engaged sessions, engagement rate, and average engagement time. Engagement rate is the new alternative to bounce rate - it measures the percentage of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion, or had at least 2 pageviews.
• Pages and screens: This is your classic "top pages" report. It shows which pages get the most views and engage users the longest. Sort by 'Views' to find your most popular content and by 'Average engagement time' to discover which pages are the most captivating.

Tech Reports (Who Your Visitors Are)

Under User > Tech, you can find important details about your audience's technology. The Tech details report lets you see what device category (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet), browser, and operating system your visitors are using. This information is vital for ensuring your site provides a good user experience for the majority of your audience.

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Going Deeper: Creating Custom Reports in the Explore Hub

The standard reports are great, but GA4's true power lies in the Explore section. This is where you can build completely custom tables, funnels, and charts when you have a specific question that the standard reports can't answer.

Let's walk through building a simple custom report to find out which blog posts are generating the most new users from organic search.

Building a Free Form Exploration Step-by-Step

Navigate to Explore in the left menu and click on Free form to start with a blank canvas.

This screen is divided into three main parts: Variables (the dimensions and metrics you can use), Tab Settings (where you build the report), and the actual output on the right.

1. Import Your Dimensions

Dimensions are the 'what' - the attributes of your data. In the Variables panel, click the + sign next to Dimensions.

Search for and import the following:

• Page path and screen class (this shows the part of the URL after the domain, like /blog/my-post-title)
• First user default channel group (this shows where your new users came from)

2. Import Your Metrics

Metrics are the 'how many' - the quantifiable numbers. In the Variables panel, click the + sign next to Metrics.

Search for and import:

• New users
• Engaged sessions

3. Build the Report by Dragging and Dropping

Now, it's time to assemble the report in the Tab Settings panel.

• Drag Page path and screen class from Variables and drop it onto Rows in Tab Settings.
• Drag New users and Engaged sessions from Variables and drop them onto Values. You'll now see a table showing a list of all your pages with new user and engagement counts.

4. Filter for Organic Traffic

Our final step is to narrow this down to only organic search traffic.

• Drag First user default channel group from Variables and drop it into the Filters box.
• In the filter configuration that appears, select 'exactly matches' and then choose 'Organic Search' from the list.
• Click Apply.

That's it! The table will update to show you the exact pages that are bringing in the most new users from organic search, sorted from highest to lowest. You've just built a custom report that's far more actionable than the standard views.

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Tracking What Matters: Setting Up Conversions

In Universal Analytics, you set up "Goals." In GA4, these are now called Conversions. Anything that signifies a successful action on your site - a purchase, a form submission, a newsletter signup - should be tracked as a conversion.

The simplest way to create a conversion is to tell GA4 that an existing event is important. For a lead generation site, a common conversion is when a user lands on a "thank you" page after submitting a form.

Here's how to set that up:

1. First, you need an event that fires only on that "thank you" page. Go to Admin > Events > Create event.
2. Click Create, give your new event a clear name like generate_lead.
3. Set the matching condition to be: event_name equals page_view AND page_location contains /thank-you (or whatever your specific page URL is).
4. Save the new event. It will now fire whenever someone views the thank you page.
5. Finally, go to Configure > Conversions in the main left-hand menu.
6. Click New conversion event and enter the exact name of the event you just created: generate_lead.
7. Click Save.

GA4 will now track every generate_lead event as a conversion, allowing you to see which campaigns and pages are most effective at driving business results.

Final Thoughts

Getting comfortable with Google Analytics 4 is all about understanding its event-based structure and learning where to find the answers you need, whether in the pre-built Reports or the highly flexible Explore hub. Once you master these areas, you unlock a much deeper understanding of how users are moving through your website and what content drives them to act.

Of course, even with GA4 mastered, consolidating data across all your other platforms - like Shopify, HubSpot, or Facebook Ads - still requires bouncing between tabs and wrestling with spreadsheets. We built Graphed to solve exactly that problem. You can connect Google Analytics and all your other data sources in seconds, then simply ask questions in plain English, like "Create a dashboard showing our funnel from Facebook Ads impressions to GA4 conversions" or "Which website pages generate the most leads in HubSpot?" It builds real-time, interactive dashboards instantly, saving you from the manual work of building reports so you can focus on the insights.