What Does Google Analytics Look Like?
Opening Google Analytics for the first time can feel like stepping into the cockpit of an airplane without a pilot's license. With all its charts, tables, and menus, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. This guide will walk you through what Google Analytics looks like, breaking down the main dashboards and reports so you can feel confident navigating your website's data.
First, Which Version Are You Looking At?
There are two versions of Google Analytics you might encounter: the current Google Analytics 4 and the older Universal Analytics (UA). Since July 2023, GA4 is the standard, and all new accounts are created here. However, you might still need to access historical data in a UA property.
The easiest way to tell them apart is the left-hand navigation menu. Universal Analytics has a menu with categories like “Audience,” “Acquisition,” and “Behavior.” GA4 has a more streamlined menu with items like “Reports” and “Explore.” We'll focus primarily on GA4, as it's the present and future of Google Analytics.
The Main GA4 Interface: Your Control Panel
When you first log in to GA4, you'll see a clean interface dominated by a navigation menu on the left and a main content area on the right. This menu is your primary way to get around.
Home: Your at-a-glance dashboard that summarizes your site's most important metrics.
Reports: The heart of GA4. This section contains the pre-built, standardized reports that answer common questions about your audience and their behavior.
Explore: An advanced feature for creating custom, free-form reports and deep-dive analyses beyond the standard reports.
Advertising: A section dedicated to understanding your ad campaign performance and conversion paths.
Configure: The "settings" area where you manage things like conversion events, audiences, and custom definitions.
The Home Dashboard: Your Quick Morning Briefing
The "Home" section is designed to give you a quick, digestible summary of what's happening on your website. It’s laid out as a series of summary "cards," each highlighting a key piece of information.
Here’s what you’ll typically see:
Overview Card: The main card shows core metrics like Users, New users, Average engagement time, and Total revenue (if you have e-commerce set up).
Realtime Card: Shows how many people have been on your site in the last 30 minutes. It's a great way to see immediate traffic from a new blog post or social media campaign.
Acquisition Card: Quickly shows where your new users are coming from (e.g., Organic Search, Direct, Paid Search).
Top Pages Card: Lists your most viewed pages and screens.
Demographics Card: Gives a quick breakdown of your users by country.
At the top right of this screen, you'll find the date range selector, one of the most important tools in GA. You can change this to view data from "Last 7 days," "Last 28 days," a custom range, or even compare two different time periods to track trends.
The Reports Section: Digging into the Details
The "Reports" section is where you’ll spend most of your time answering specific questions about your website. It's organized into a lifecycle framework: Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention. Think of it as telling the story of the customer journey.
Acquisition Reports: How Do People Find You?
This is where you go to find out which channels are driving traffic to your site.
Traffic acquisition report: This report shows you where your sessions came from. Did someone find you through Google search? A link on Facebook? By typing your URL directly into their browser? It breaks down traffic by "Session default channel group" - categories like Organic Search, Direct, Organic Social, Referral, and Paid Search.
Each row in the table represents a channel (the dimension), and the columns show metrics like Users, Sessions, Engaged sessions, and Conversions tied to that channel. The line chart at the top visualizes this data over your selected time period, making it easy to spot spikes or dips.
Engagement Reports: What Are People Doing on Your Site?
Once users arrive, what do they do? The Engagement section helps you answer that. The two most useful reports here are "Events" and "Pages and screens."
Pages and screens report: This report is your go-to for understanding content performance. It lists all the pages on your website and shows you key metrics for each, including:
Views: The total number of times a page was viewed.
Users: The number of unique people who viewed a page.
Average engagement time: A measure of how long, on average, your page was in the foreground of a user's browser. It's a great indicator of how captivating your content is.
Events report: GA4 is built around the concept of "events." An event is any interaction a user has with your site - viewing a page (
page_view), scrolling down (scroll), or clicking a link (click). This report lists all the events you're tracking and how many times they've occurred. It’s more technical but incredibly powerful.
Monetization Reports: Are You Making Money?
If you run an e-commerce store or sell anything on your website, the Monetization reports are crucial. They help you connect user behavior to revenue.
The E-commerce purchases report is a popular one. It shows you which products are viewed most, which are added to the cart most often, and which ones generate the most revenue. It breaks down the full purchasing funnel, giving you visibility into your sales performance.
Data Tables and Charts: The Building Blocks of Every Report
Regardless of which report you’re looking at in GA4, they all pretty much look the same visually. They are composed of two main elements: a chart at the top and a detailed data table below it.
The Charts (Line or Bar): The visualization at the top helps you see trends instantly. You can hover your mouse over the chart to see data for a specific day. This is useful for spotting, for example, which day of the week your traffic is highest or if a marketing campaign caused a noticeable increase in users.
The Data Table: This is where the raw numbers live. The first column is always an "all-caps-case" Dimension (e.g., SESSION DEFAULT CHANNEL GROUPING, PAGE PATH), which is the "what" you're measuring. The subsequent columns are the Metrics (e.g., Sessions, Users, Revenue), which are the numbers associated with that dimension.
These tables are interactive. You can:
Click a column header to sort the data (e.g., click "Sessions" to see which channel brought the most visits).
Use the search bar just above the table to filter for a specific item (e.g., type "blog" to see data only for your blog pages).
Add a secondary dimension by clicking the blue "+" icon to add more detail (e.g., add "Device category" to see which channels bring in the most mobile vs. desktop traffic).
A Quick Look at Universal Analytics (The Old Version)
If you're looking at an account created before mid-2022, you might see the older Universal Analytics interface. Its structure is different, organized around four key sections:
Audience: Tells you who is visiting your site (demographics, location, device type).
Acquisition: Shows you how users got to your site (channels like Organic Search, Social, Referral).
Behavior: Details what users do on your site (which pages they visit, how long they stay).
Conversions: Tracks whether users completed valuable actions on your site (like filling out a form or making a purchase).
The reporting look and feel is similar - charts on top, tables below - but the metrics are different. UA was obsessed with sessions and pageviews, whereas GA4 is built around a more flexible model of users and events.
Final Thoughts
So, what does Google Analytics look like? It looks like a storybook for your website. The home page is the cover summary, and each report inside is a chapter detailing a different part of your user's journey. By understanding the main layout and the purpose of key reports like traffic acquisition and pages, you can turn a dashboard of numbers into actionable insights to grow your business.
Navigating different platforms like Google Analytics, ad managers, and your CRM just to piece together that story can take hours of manual work. Instead of spending your day exporting data and building reports, we created Graphed to do it for you. We let you connect your data sources in seconds and use simple, natural language to get answers and create real-time dashboards automatically, helping you focus on the insights, not just the data gathering.