GA4 Reporting Overview: How to Customize and Use Standard Reports

what's up we're talking about ga4 reporting in this video specifically we're going to talk about standard reports and how we can customize those standard reports [Music] we're going to get started with an overall overview of the reporting ecosystem in ga4 so when we log into ga4 we see a bunch of data displayed as a graph on our screen here looking right now at the report's snapshot within the reporting area here accessible through the left-hand navigation and there's lots of different reports here we're going to talk through what they're telling us later in this video but there's also this section right down here under reports called explore explore these are Google's Explorations which Google calls Advanced Techniques when we want to go further than what might be available in the standard reports so both of these areas we can do some customization to get the reports to show us exactly what we're looking for so we've already done the first one on our list looking at standard reports versus Explorations and GA forms what those things are we'll talk about reporting philosophy how it's different in ga4 versus universal Analytics and then we'll do some reporting walkthroughs we'll start with the life cycle report collection in ga4 and then we'll do the user report walkthrough in ga4 finally we will wrap up we will wrap up with how we can customize a standard report so I don't think you'll find this anywhere in the official ga4 documentation but it seems like with universal Analytics the reporting philosophy was basically let's make a suite of pre-made reports that are ready to be analyzed ga4 it seems like again that Google didn't tell me this but it seems more like hey let's make fewer reports but have a whole bunch of data all based on this flexible event based model that ga4 users can customize as needed let me show you an example of what I'm talking about this is the root and Branch Universal analytics property if we look at the left-hand navigation here we can see all of these reports we expand into these audience reporting area we can there's a ton of reports right just within geography here we can see language or location Behavior we can see new versus returning frequency and recency engagement if we look at demographics overview age and gender all of these are broken out into their own reports within acquisition all traffic reports channels tree map Source medium and referrals Google ads has their own reporting Suite search console does in Behavior we can see everything from all pages to landing pages to exit pages you get the idea in ga4 it's much more Spartan if you haven't customized or added to your report collection you'll only get a few reports in acquisition here just a few in engagement and a few in monetization which if you're not an e-commerce site or your site's not monetized in any way those don't apply to you and then there are just a few user reports demographics and Tech in the root and Branch ga4 property I've added a few specific custom reports like this Source medium traffic report and an all campaigns report so we can start to build out a little more functionality when we do that customer reporting but at Baseline it's less than half as many reports in ga4 relative to Universal Analytics the area with the most reports in ga4 is this life cycle reporting area let's talk about that a little bit more what Google says is a life cycle collection helps you to understand each stage in the customer Journey right from acquisition down to retention so think about the marketing funnel or the user Journey here for these life cycle reports Google says the collection allows us to understand how people use our site or our app but not information about our users that stuff we find in the users collection of reports so here's reporting in ga4 remember we have to go access reports with that icon there and then there all of our life cycle reports acquisition down to retention below that which we'll talk about later is where the user reports are so acquisition to engagement to monetization to retention which again if you're mapping out a user Journey that's probably how you think about people coming to your web property you engaging with them you monetizing them and then hopefully you're getting them to come back acquisition is the first of the life cycle reports there are three specific reports they all focus on answering one main question how are your users acquired how do they first come to your website this is the ga4 property for the Google merchandise store so if we go into acquisition let's take a look first at acquisition overview these are just kind of like your acquisition stats at a glance this is where if you've linked up your Google ads account with ga4 you'll be able to see some of that information here and also just some snapshots on how traffic is coming to your site users new users what's happening in the last 30 minutes and how traffic is arriving by Channel if we look at the user acquisition report it's going to be sorted based on how users arrive on your site for the first time you can see this metric right here new users and we can see how those new users how many engaged sessions they were responsible for what their engagement rate was and other metrics if we want to change our primary Dimension we can change from first user default Channel group to First user medium first user Source medium Etc and if we scroll out to the right we will see our Revenue this is an e-commerce store and we can also change our conversions if we wanted to look at something different here traffic acquisition instead of it's very similar to the report we just looked at but this but this is going to be showing us users and sessions so instead of just new users this is going to show active users there's a larger number than people who came just for the first time otherwise a very similar report you can see all of those same metrics sort in the same ways next in life cycle we have the engagement reporting means while acquisition is focused on how do people arrive on our site engagement is going to tell us what are they doing after they arrive let's go back to Google's merchandise store ga4 property moving down to engagement let's look at this engagement overview similar to the acquisition overview this is just like a snapshot we can get at a glance what is happening on the site right here we can see total event counts by event name top pages viewed right to the right of it these are things that we'll Explore More in the additional reports here in this in this section an event name the event list here we can see just a total running list all of the events that happened on the site whether they're automatically collected or enhanced measurement events or custom events that we set up they're all going to be here you can change the display if you want to see more than 10 at a time you can do that here any of those events that we have asked ga4 to track as conversions they will show up here in the conversions report so this is what this specific admin for this property has decided are the most important conversions cart views view items purchases checkout starts adding payment info you can see the rest finally we have pages and screens this is closest to the behavior report we saw in Universal analytics where we were looking at all pages so we can see right now it's sorted by Page title and class sorted by total number of views we can now see page path here as well which is a little bit closer to those of us who were used to Universal analytics to what we were used to next we have the monetization reports there are four of them here monetization reports this should go without saying but it's only relevant for businesses that have monetized their website or app whether that's through e-commerce or in-app purchases or if there are publisher ads that are displayed on the site in the case of Google's merchandise store they don't have an app and they don't have publisher ads so they're only going to have these two reports here they've modified their collection so they're only seeing these two we'll look at this when we end up customizing the report but if you want to change what reports are displayed in your own collections you'll go down here to library I don't have access for that here so we'll display that on the root and Branch ga4 property monetization overview overview for Google here's the total revenue total ad Revenue obviously zero they haven't monetized their site with Publisher ads but we can see average purchase Revenue per user what are some of those top items and then when we go into the e-commerce purchases we'll get that information but at a deeper more granular level you see our different top items we can change that from 10 to 25 and we'll see the total number of times those items reviewed added to cart purchased and what Revenue they are responsible for we'll also see some metrics like purchase to view rate and cart to view rate as well so we and it's possible to change from item name to item ID or category here last of the life cycle reports is retention so what somebody has converted and been monetized are they coming back that's our retention reports this is where we'll be able to see our audience based on new versus returning users so let's click down into retention and this is where we can see new users returning users something clearly happened right here some big spike happened yes I don't know what happened on December 7th but whoever is responsible for marketing for the Google merchandise store they certainly would all right let's wrap up with just the the few user reports that we have here in demographics we can see demographics overview and demographic details and demographic overview we're going to see some stats on users by age by interests and by City some of this data you're only going to be able to see if you have Google signals turned turned on and then demographic graphic details or we can look at our users by country or by age we can start to see how performance breaks down that way we will see there are a lot of unknown here as well so the fact that so much of this data is unknown means that a lot of users haven't consented for Google to track that specific bit of information from them so that's one big difference between ga4 versus universal Analytics if we look at the tech reports this is where we'll be able to see about the browsers and the specific device devices that are accessing our site so for the Google merchandise store about 50 of their traffic is from desktop five percent from tablet and the balance on mobile you can click in to see hey what are those specific device categories that'll show us the tech details page right here desktop mobile tablet we can compare performance for example average engagement time on desktop 3 minutes and 17 seconds comparing to 46 seconds on tablet in just over a minute on mobile and we can also change this if we want to slice our data a different way say bye operating system and that's really all we get for these user reports much more limited than the days of universal analytics all right now let's make a custom report out of one of these standard reports back here at the ga4 root and Branch property you can see there's this search console widget here so if you have integrated your search console property with ga4 you'll be able to see this here as well check the link in the description if you want to know how to do that it is not that time consuming so let's look at our Google organic search traffic let's look at how we could build a report showing all of our traffic from organic search broken down by the different search engines let's go to acquisition and traffic acquisition here now anytime we want to customize the report we're going to hit this pencil icon in the top right so let's do that to customize the report if there's some Dimensions or metrics that we want to include in the report that aren't yet available this is where we would add them right here add dimension in this case though I just want to see various sources for organic search and source is already there and let's say I don't know we didn't want to see this bar chart but we wanted to see the line chart for some reason now let's add a filter so we're going to include the channel only for organic search and we will apply that and now instead of showing the channel rolled up we want to show the specific Source this is going to allow us to see performance by Google versus Bing versus DuckDuckGo Yahoo Baidu Etc and those different things are graft here you know what this is just going to be Google taking over so let's maybe hide the line chart and we'll actually decide to show the bar chart and we can start to see yeah how engages our traffic coming from these different sources man out of the box looks like DuckDuckGo with a very very limited traffic has an engagement time that's more than twice as high as Google so that could be interesting to check out more what are those pages maybe that are ranking are there things that are working in DuckDuckGo that would go that we might be able to bring over to other organic search efforts now if we want to save this hit this blue button save it as a new report if we want to keep this the current one and just add a new one so we'll save this as a new report and we will call this organic search performance source report description organic search traffic level and we'll save it in the bottom left we can see the report has been saved in the library so let's go see what that means we'll hit this back button here we'll go find that report in our library we'll show you how we can add that into our life cycle collection and here we can see down here this Library so let's click that here we can see our three collections lifecycle search console and user if we scroll down we can see that report we just created organic search performance by sources right here and let's say we wanted to move this into one of our collections just to be crazy let's put it in our search console reports which is going to be all Google organic search data but now this will be one thing that's not Google organic search so let's scroll down and there it is organic search performance by sources right here so let's just move it on in to our search console collection here and then we can save it we'll save this to the current collection and if we click into it we can see the report we built and it'll be there for us to edit if we wanted to say look at the last 28 days but apply a comparison would be able to do that kind of stuff here as well it's kind of like our hub for all things organic search wow you stuck around till the end thanks for watching if you like this video let me know I'd really appreciate it have a great rest your day out there [Music]

Channel: Root & Branch Digital Marketing

Views: 2,194

Keywords: ga4 reports, google analytics 4 reports, how to customize ga4 reports, custom reports ga4, standard reports ga4

Id: -2rvWPqFd2E

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2022