Your Guide to the Different Types of GA4 Reports

In this video, Jon from our Internet Marketing team will explore some of the different types of reports you can access in Google Analytics 4. Keep reading to find out more!

Transcript

Everyone loves data. I think we can all remember when we were kids, and we’d spend all our free time putting together Excel spreadsheets for fun. Ah… those were the days.

… Oh, you didn’t do that as a kid? That was just me? Okay.

Still, data is super useful to businesses like yours. By looking at data reports about your website activity, for example, you can learn a lot about your audience — who they are, what they want, and how you can better market to them. That’s exactly what Google Analytics lets you do.

The most recent version of Google Analytics is GA4, and it has a slightly different array of reports than previous versions. In this video, we’re gonna give you an overview of those reports. Keep watching to learn more. Plus, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Standard reports

You can find the majority of the reports in GA4 in — you guessed it — the “Reports” tab.

These non-custom reports are known as standard reports. Let’s go over the different types of standard reports.

Realtime reports

The first type of standard reports in GA4 is Realtime reports.

These reports show you a live feed of what’s happening on your website. To start with, they let you see how many users are currently on your site. You can then view other reports showing where those users are located, which channels they found your site through, which pages they’re viewing, and more.

Acquisition reports

Most of the standard reports are divided up between the four life cycle stages: Acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention. First, we have acquisition reports.

These reports focus on which channels help you get the most users and traffic. Within these reports, you can also see things like sessions, engagement rates, and more.

There are three tabs in the “Acquisition” section: Acquisition overview, User acquisition, and traffic acquisition. Each of them have different charts and graphs, but they all serve the purpose of showing you which channels are driving leads and traffic to your website.

Engagement reports

After acquisition comes engagement. Engagement reports show you how users are behaving on your website.

There are a few different types of engagement reports. You have an “Overview” tab, and also tabs for “Events,” “Conversions,” “Pages and screens,” and “Landing page.”

All of these reports help you view user activity and site interactions. Basically, they help you understand what people do once they’ve found your website. You can see how many people took a specific action like viewing a page or promotion, as well as how many converted into leads or customers. This gives you an idea of how effective your web design and content is.

Monetization reports

The next stage of the life cycle is monetization.

Monetization reports are all about the sales and revenue you drive on your website. As you might expect, this type of report is most relevant if you have an online store.

Not counting the overview page, there are four pages in this section: “Ecommerce purchases,” “In-app purchases,” “Publisher ads,” and “User purchase journey.” These pages let you see what products people are buying on your website and your mobile app (if you have one). You can also see the journey users take on your site before making a purchase.

Retention reports

The last life cycle stage is “Retention.”

This section lets you view metrics like user engagement and customer lifetime value. You can use it to see how successful you are at bringing users back to your site after their initial visit.

User reports

In addition to the life cycle reports, there are also user reports. One type of user report is the demographics report. Believe it or not, demographics reports are about user demographics. I know, shocking.

You can view reports about your website visitors’ age, gender, interests, location, and more. That helps you get a more complete picture of your audience so that you can more effectively market to them.

Tech reports

The last type of standard reports is tech reports.

These reports focus specifically on the technology people are using to visit your website. That means you can view data on the devices, browsers, and even screen resolutions that people are using. When you know that info, you can optimize your web design to better fit the tech your site visitors are using.

Exploration reports

So far, we’ve only talked about standard reports. But in GA4, there are also exploration reports, which Google just calls “explorations.” These reports are in a totally separate tab of Analytics, below the “Reports” tab.

So, what exactly are exploration reports? Well, basically, they’re a new type of GA4 reporting that goes beyond basic metrics and helps you uncover deeper and more niche insights about your audience.

You can create several different types of exploration reports. For example, you can create tree graphs to map the journey that different users take on your site. Or, you can create Venn diagrams to see which of your audience segments overlap with one another. There are several other options as well.

Unlike with standard reports, Google doesn’t automatically create these reports for you. You can set them up yourself by modifying preexisting templates, so they’re more customized to fit exactly what you’re looking for.

Learn more about marketing analytics with WebFX

It’s really important to keep up with what’s happening on your website, and GA4 reporting is one of the best ways to do that. But there are also other types of marketing analytics besides GA4 reports.

No matter what kind of marketing analytics you’re interested in learning more about, WebFX can help. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, or to our email newsletter, to see more helpful marketing info.

Well, that’s it for this video. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time!