How to Use New Google Analytics

If you've logged into Google Analytics recently, you've noticed things look dramatically different. The old Universal Analytics (UA) is gone, and the new Google Analytics 4 is now the standard. Instead of a simple facelift, this is a complete rebuild, shifting how we measure and understand website performance. This guide will walk you through navigating the new interface, finding the reports you actually need, and understanding the core concepts behind GA4 so you can get back to tracking what matters most.

The Biggest Change: Understanding Events vs. Sessions

The most important thing to grasp about GA4 is its fundamental shift in measurement philosophy. It's like changing from counting how many people enter your store to tracking every single thing each person does inside.

• Universal Analytics (UA) was Session-Based: It bundled user interactions into "sessions." Metrics like Pageviews, Bounce Rate, and Time on Page were the main currency. It treated a user's visit like one continuous event.
• Google Analytics 4 is Event-Based: It unbundles everything. A page view is an event. A scroll is an event. A click is an event. A video play is an event. A purchase is an event. Everything is just an event.

This might seem complicated, but it’s actually far more powerful. This event-driven model allows for more flexible, user-centric tracking that works seamlessly across both websites and mobile apps, giving you a more complete picture of the customer journey.

Finding Your Way Around: A Tour of Key GA4 Reports

The new left-hand navigation menu in GA4 can feel intimidating. For most day-to-day use, you’ll spend your time in the Reports section. Let's break down where to find the answers to your most common questions.

The Reports Snapshot: Your New Dashboard

When you first click into the Reports section, you’ll land on the Reports snapshot. This is your high-level dashboard, giving you a quick, customizable overview of your most important metrics. You'll see cards for Users, New Users, Views by page title, and Traffic channels. It's a great place to start your day and check the vital signs of your site's performance.

Acquisition Reports: Where Are My Visitors Coming From?

This is probably the most common question marketers have. GA4 splits this into two primary reports, and understanding the difference is key.

Navigate to: Reports > Acquisition

Traffic acquisition report

This is the report you're most familiar with from UA. It tells you which channels are driving sessions to your website. If you want to know what channel a user came from for their specific visit right now, this is the report to use. You can see sessions, users, and conversion data broken down by source/medium, campaign, and more.

Example Question: "Did the social media posts I made this week drive any traffic and leads?"

User acquisition report

This report takes a longer-term view. It shows you the channel that brought a user to your website for their very first time. This is more about understanding how you are acquiring new customers over their entire lifetime, not just for a single session. It helps you credit the channel that truly discovered your brand.

Example Question: "What channels are best at bringing brand-new people to our website, regardless of how they returned later?"

Engagement Reports: What Are People Doing On My Site?

Once users arrive, you need to know what they're doing. The Engagement reports give you insight into user behavior, content performance, and conversions.

Navigate to: Reports > Engagement

The End of Bounce Rate, The Rise of Engagement Rate

One of the biggest shocks for long-time GA users is the removal of Bounce Rate. GA4 replaces it with "Engagement Rate" and "Engaged Sessions." An engaged session is any visit that meets one of the following criteria:

• Lasted longer than 10 seconds (you can adjust this timing).
• Included a conversion event.
• Had at least 2 pageviews.

Your Engagement Rate is simply the percentage of total sessions that were engaged sessions. This is a much more nuanced and useful metric. Instead of measuring who left immediately (a bounce), you're now measuring how many people actually took a meaningful action, even if it was just staying on the page to read for a bit.

Pages and Screens Report

This is the successor to Universal Analytics's "All Pages" report. It shows you which pages on your site are getting the most views. You can see metrics like Views, Users, and an especially useful one: Views per user. This can help you identify your best-performing blog posts, most-visited landing pages, and other popular content.

Example Question: "What are my top 10 most popular articles from the last month?"

Conversions Report

In UA, you set up "Goals." In GA4, you mark key events as "Conversions." Anything can be a conversion, from a lead form submission to a newsletter signup. This report consolidates all the conversions you've configured, showing you which actions are being completed most often. This is where you track your most important business outcomes.

Example Question: "How many people filled out our contact form last week?"

Monetization Reports: How Much Revenue Are We Generating?

For eCommerce businesses, this is your central hub for performance. These reports are populated by purchase events and other revenue-related tracking you set up.

Navigate to: Reports > Monetization

Here you can find:

• Ecommerce purchases: A detailed report on individual product performance, including items viewed, added to cart, and purchased.
• Purchase journey: A funnel report showing you how users move from viewing a product to adding it to their cart and making a purchase, helping you identify drop-off points.

Go Deeper with "Explore" Reports

"Reports" gives you the key daily metrics, but what if you need to answer a more complex, specific question? That’s where the Explore section comes in.

Explore reports let you build custom analyses from scratch. Using a drag-and-drop interface, you can create advanced tables, funnels, and path explorations that go far beyond what the standard reports offer. For example, you could build a cohort analysis to see if users acquired from your summer ad campaign retain better than users from organic search.

While a full walkthrough is a topic for another day, just know that when you feel limited by the standard reports, the answer you're looking for probably lives in "Explore."

Three Quick Tips for Better GA4 Use

1. Mark Key Events as Conversions: GA4 automatically tracks events like page_view and scroll, but it doesn’t know what's a conversion to you. When you log in, go to Admin > Data display > Events and flip the toggle to mark important events (like a generate_lead or completing a free trial signup) as conversions. This will make your most important data show up in the Conversion reports.
2. Use the Search Bar: The search bar at the top of GA4 is surprisingly powerful. You can type in the name of a report to jump there instantly, or even ask simple questions like "How many users from Canada last week?" and it will often pull up the relevant report with those filters applied.
3. Customize Your Reports Navigation: Feeling overwhelmed by all the options? At the bottom of the reports menu, there's a "Library" link. From here, you can hide reports you never use and reorganize collections to put your most-used reports front and center.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics 4 is a powerful platform, but it demands a slight shift in mindset. Instead of thinking about sessions and pageviews, focus on users and the events they trigger. The best way to get comfortable is to start with the essentials: use the Acquisition reports to see where your users come from and the Engagement reports to understand what they do when they arrive.

Even with this guide, pulling together insights from GA4 and comparing them to your ad platforms, CRM, and sales data can still feel like a full-time job. That's why we created Graphed. After easily connecting your data sources like Google Analytics, you can just ask questions in plain English - like "create a dashboard showing GA4 traffic sources vs Shopify revenue" - and instantly see the answer visualized. It’s the easiest way to get the insights you need from GA4 and all your other tools without the steep learning curve.