What is Included in Google Analytics?

So you've installed the Google Analytics tracking tag on your website, and data is starting to flow in. Now what? When you first log in, you're greeted with a collection of charts, menus, and terms that can feel a bit overwhelming. This guide will walk you through the key components of Google Analytics 4, explaining what's included and how you can use it to understand your audience and grow your business.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Getting Around: A Quick Tour of the GA4 Interface

The first step is knowing where to find everything. The main navigation menu on the left side of your screen is the command center of Google Analytics 4. It’s primarily organized into four key sections:

• Reports: This is where you’ll find pre-built, summary-level reports about your website or app's performance. Think of this as your daily check-in spot.
• Explore: This section contains advanced tools and techniques for deeper analysis. It's where you can build custom reports from scratch to answer highly specific questions.
• Advertising: This is a dedicated workspace to help you understand the performance of your paid marketing campaigns and see the full customer journey.
• Configure: Here, you manage the building blocks of your GA4 account, like events, conversions, and audiences.

Let's break down what you can find and do in each of these sections.

The "Reports" Section: Your Day-to-Day Dashboard

For most users, the Reports section is a fantastic starting point. It provides a "snapshot" of your performance, with neatly organized, pre-made reports that cover the core areas of your business. These are designed to answer the most common questions without requiring any complex setup.

Realtime Report: What's Happening Right Now

Just like it sounds, the Realtime report shows you what's happening on your website or app in the last 30 minutes. It's a live look at your traffic.

What’s included:

• A world map showing where your current visitors are located.
• The number of users currently active.
• Which traffic sources are sending you visitors right now (e.g., Google, social media).
• The specific pages or app screens users are viewing.
• Events and conversions as they happen.

Practical Use-Case: Did you just send out a big email newsletter or launch a new social media campaign? Pop open the Realtime report to watch the immediate influx of traffic and see if people are visiting the page you intended.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Acquisition Reports: Where Your Visitors Come From

Understanding where your audience originates is fundamental to any marketing strategy. The Acquisition reports tell you exactly that.

What’s included:

• User acquisition report: Shows you how new users discovered your site for the first time. It's a great way to measure which channels are attracting a fresh audience.
• Traffic acquisition report: Shows you where the traffic for all sessions (both new and returning users) originated. This is perfect for analyzing the performance of specific marketing campaigns.

These reports break down traffic by what GA4 calls "session default channel grouping" - categories like Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, and Social. You can click into each channel to see more details, such as the specific referring website or the Google Ads campaign name.

Practical Use-Case: You want to know if your content marketing and SEO efforts are paying off. Head to the Traffic acquisition report and look at the trend for the "Organic Search" channel. If you see sustained growth in users and sessions from that channel, you know your hard work is making an impact.

Engagement Reports: What People Do on Your Site

Once visitors arrive, what do they do? Do they click around, read content, watch videos, or leave immediately? The Engagement reports answer these questions.

What’s included:

• Events: GA4 is built around "events." An event is any user interaction you want to track. Many are collected automatically (like page_view, session_start, first_visit, and scroll), but you can also define custom events for things like form submissions or video plays.
• Conversions: A "conversion" is just an event that you've marked as particularly important for your business, such as purchase, generate_lead, or sign_up. This report shows you how many times those key value actions occur.
• Pages and screens: This powerful report lists your most popular pages. You can see how many views each page gets, the total number of users who have seen it, and the average engagement time.

The key metric in these reports is Engaged sessions. GA4 considers a session "engaged" if the visitor stayed on the site for more than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or viewed at least two pages. This is a much better indicator of user interest than the old "bounce rate" metric.

Practical Use-Case: You just published a new blog post and poured hours into it. Go to the Pages and screens report to see if people are actually finding it (Views) and, more importantly, if they are sticking around to read it (Average engagement time). If the engagement time is low, you might need to improve your introduction or make the content more skimmable.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Monetization Reports: Tracking Revenue and Sales

If you sell products or services directly on your site, the Monetization reports will be your best friend. This is where you connect user behavior to real business results.

What’s included:

• Ecommerce purchases: Shows detailed information on which products are being sold, including quantity, item revenue, and add-to-carts.
• Purchase journey: A funnel report showing how users move from viewing a product to adding it to their cart and finally completing a purchase. This is fantastic for identifying drop-off points in your checkout process.

Practical Use-Case: Want to know which products were the most popular during your last holiday sale? The Ecommerce purchases report will give you a list of top-selling items ranked by revenue or quantity sold, helping you plan inventory and future promotions.

Demographics and Tech Reports: Understanding Your Audience

These reports give you a better technical and demographic profile of your audience.

What’s included:

• Demographic details: See visitors by country, city, age, and gender (if you have enabled Google Signals).
• Tech details: Learn what technology your audience uses, including web browser, device category (desktop, mobile, tablet), and operating system.

Practical Use-Case: You're planning a redesign of your website. Before you start, check the Tech details report. If you see that 70% of your users visit your site on mobile devices, you know you need to prioritize a mobile-first design strategy.

The "Explore" Section: Build Your Own Reports

The standard reports are excellent for answering "what happened," but the Explore section is for answering "why did it happen?" and "what if?" This is a custom report builder where you can mix and match dimensions and metrics to uncover deeper insights.

What’s included:

• Blank Exploration: A completely free-form canvas to build a report with tables or charts exactly as you need them.
• Funnel exploration: Map out the steps a user takes to complete a task (like signing up or purchasing) and see where they drop off. The standard reports have a purchase journey funnel, but here you can build one for any series of actions.
• Path exploration: Visualize the journey users take through your site or app, step-by-step. See what pages they view before or after visiting a key page.

While this area requires more familiarity with GA4 terms, it's incredibly powerful. You're no longer limited to the reports Google thinks you need - you can build new ones tailored to your unique business questions.

Practical Use-Case: You want to know what people do right after reading a blog post. Do they go to your services page, visit another post, or leave? You can build a Path exploration report that starts with the blog post's URL and see the top paths users take next.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

The "Advertising" Section: Connecting Ads to Actions

This workspace zooms in on the performance of your paid media campaigns and helps you understand how different channels work together in attributing conversions.

What’s included:

• All channels: Compare the performance of paid and non-paid channels at a glance.
• Attribution: This is a key area. The Model comparison tool lets you see how different attribution models (like first-click vs. data-driven) assign credit for conversions. The Conversion paths report shows you the full sequence of touchpoints that led to a sale or a lead.

Practical Use-Case: A user clicks your Google Ad, leaves your site, then comes back a week later by clicking a link in your newsletter and makes a purchase. The Conversion paths report will show you that full journey, proving that both the ad and the email played a role, so you can credit both channels accurately.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics includes a rich suite of tools designed to move you from basic traffic monitoring to a deep understanding of user behavior. By getting familiar with the standard Reports, branching out into custom Explorations, and tracking campaign effectiveness in the Advertising section, you can start turning raw data into actionable insights for your business.

We know that even with great tools, piecing the whole story together by jumping between Google Analytics, your ad platforms, and your e-commerce store is time-consuming. That's why we created Graphed. It lets you skip the manual report-building and ask questions in plain English, like "Show me my top traffic channels by revenue for the last month," and get a live dashboard instantly - no need to configure a single report. We connect all your sources in one place so you can get back to growing your business instead of wrangling data.