Google Analytics 4 Reports: Complete Guide to Reading GA4 Data

For marketers, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is like a kids’ toy box, brimming with useful insights, custom report opportunities and countless ways to measure user acquisition. Pop open the lid, and your whole world changes. Do you reach for that valuable insight first? No, wait, there’s an important user interaction metric over there. Hold on — are those search console analytics that can help shape your paid search strategies? 

The good news is that, if GA4 is your toybox, all of the internet is your playroom. You have all the space and freedom you need to turn GA4 exploration into your new favorite game — whether you’re looking to optimize your website traffic, refine your Google Ad campaigns or integrate Google Tag Manager for more streamlined data collection.

But a certain tool in this box is particularly cool. If the others are action figures, diecast cars and Barbie Dreamhouses, this one could be a life-sized and fully-functioning Millennium Falcon. We’re talking about Google Analytics 4 reports — a goldmine of data that makes digital marketing like a day at your favorite theme park.

From acquisition overview to screens report analysis, these insights can guide data-driven decisions and fuel your marketing analytics. Here’s the complete guide to what GA4 is telling you (and why it matters).

Explain It Like I’m 4: A Quick Rundown of Google Analytics Reports

Let’s say GA4 reports are really like a fully-functioning Millennium Falcon toy. You probably couldn’t walk right in and know how to fly this famous spaceship — unless, of course, you’re its equally famous pilot, Han Solo.

So if you happen to be Han, you can skip this section. Otherwise, let’s take a quick and easy look at how Google Analytics 4 and GA4 reports came to be.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a tool called Urchin that served as the foundation for what we now call a Google Analytics report. This eventually became Universal Analytics, which then became GA4. To make things more complicated, GA4 now exists in two versions: The free GA4 Standard and its Premium cousin, GA4 360.

The most modern iterations of GA4 put a lot of power in your hands, including:

• Flexible but powerful privacy controls
• Cross-platform, cross-domain tracking for maximum visibility
• Data models and analytics for your key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Every valuable insight you can think of, from active users to traffic sources
• Tools for search engine optimization (SEO), user behavior, content performance and more

But you know what they say about great power and great responsibility. That’s why it’s important to know the top GA4 terms, including the following essentials:

Engaged Sessions

GA4 identifies an engaged session if a visitor does one or more of these:

• Spends 10+ seconds on your site
• Views 2+ internal pages
• Has a conversion event

This GA4 data provides insight into page traffic, session length, demographic details and more. It’s also closely tied to user experience because it shows how visitors interact with your content, giving you actionable insights on what they engage with most.

Path Exploration

In GA4, path exploration is a look at the virtual road map your visitors follow as they navigate your site. This includes scrolling, clicks, interactions, data entry and more. It’s a great way to learn about user behavior and preferences, and it can inform everything from your custom report setup to event tracking strategies in your marketing analytics.

Reports

GA4 reports are the story of your content, web presence and target audience all wrapped into one. There’s no single data source for this information; instead, GA4 gathers information from across your websites and apps — including any user data captured through Google Tag Manager or other data collection tools.

Reports are split into different types. The broadest categories are “overview reports,” which summarize data about a whole topic, and “detail reports,” which provide an in-depth look at a particular interest area. Other classifications include:

• Realtime report: This is where data goes as soon as GA4 receives it. Details can include number of users, traffic sources, event counts, conversions and more.
• Snapshot report: This is an at-a-glance roundup of your most important information.
• Predefined report: This type covers predefined data and metrics.

How To Use Google Analytics Reports

Now that you know the basics, it’s time to see what Google Analytics 4 reporting can really do. Here’s what you need to know to pilot this tool like a pro:

Find Your Reports

Open GA. You’ll see a menu on the left side, which should show “Reports” with a little graph icon. Everyone with GA access will see the same reports here — generally snapshot, real-time and predefined reports. You can click on each one for a more detailed view, and Google Search Console insights to complement this data for a fuller acquisition overview.

Use Your Reports

Here’s where things get interesting. Best practices for using your data will differ depending on whether you’re looking at a detailed or an overview report — and, perhaps more importantly, what your KPIs are.

Generally speaking, you can turn to GA4 reports for data on:

• Users: This includes devices, demographics, engagements and more. You’ll even see graphs and maps that visualize all this data to help you optimize your user experience.
• Acquisitions and conversions: You’ll get important information about how people first find your site, when they make purchases and how often they fill out forms. Although GA4 automatically identifies trigger events, you can customize these settings, too. This can highlight the impact of Google Ad campaigns or other paid search strategies.
• Commerce: Your E-commerce data all lives in GA4, including tracking across campaigns, keywords, devices and locations (and the associated revenue). Combine these metrics with monetization reports to get a big-picture view of your marketing data.
• Digital journeys: Compare information across channels to see how digital journeys twist and turn through your touchpoints, from your screens report metrics to engagement report data that reveal how long people stay on each page.

Once you have these insights, it’s time to make them actionable. This is when it’s handy to have a digital marketing platform that can integrate Google Analytics data to create a complete snapshot of your “playroom” — essentially, putting every action right next to its concrete outcome. That way, you can see what’s working, what needs improvement and where new report strategies fit in.

Get Specific Data

Need to get more specific? Anyone with editor or administrator access to your GA account can customize reports, which means you get to choose exactly what you’re tracking. Every GA4 property can have up to 150 of these custom reports, allowing you to focus on everything from data collection details to specific event tracking metrics.

Remember, there’s a difference between detail reports and overview reports — so it’s no surprise that the processes for customizing them can differ, too. For example, the former includes a dimension picker, metrics, filters and charts that can all be tweaked; meanwhile, the latter is split into editable “cards” and “report templates.” 

These customization features help marketers dig deeper into user acquisition funnels or retention report updates, as well as slice and dice the data for more actionable insights. You might create a custom report that focuses solely on paid search campaigns or sets out to reveal user paths across your mobile app.

Getting More From Google Analytics Data

How do you unite custom and standard report data? What’s the best way to share it, visualize it and make it matter? That all depends on your unique situation — but there are a few tools that can help across the board. All you have to do is crack open some more marketing toy boxes to keep refining your marketing analytics strategy.

For Sharing and Exporting

Google provides built-in tools for extracting your GA4 data. These enable you to share the information via a link; you can also download it as a PDF or CSV. The tech giant also mentions Looker Studio and its Analytics Data API as effective options for deeper data sources integration.

These aren’t the only tools available for data extraction. However, when researching third-party options, it’s important to remember a few details:

• Most tools are external (from Google and from your own company), meaning they require more steps and often third-party accounts or authentication. This can sometimes eat into your time and budget.
• You’ll still need to get extracted data to all the right people. This can be difficult when using platforms or applications that don’t keep everyone together with specific permissions (as GA4 does).
• Every outside tool you use is one more potential entry point for hackers, especially if the tool is free or seems suspicious in any way.

For Tracking

Sometimes, there’s nothing better than a good old-fashioned spreadsheet — except maybe a digitized one. The good news is that you can find tools that help you grab GA4 data and move it cleanly to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. 

You’ll generally need to:

• Connect your accounts
• Grant the proper permissions
• Clean up or transform your data
• Select an existing spreadsheet or make a new one.
• Run the data transfer

Some tools let you automate these transfers at regular intervals — that way, your spreadsheet updates every time GA4 does. This process can be invaluable for drilling down into demographic details, marketing data, user acquisition metrics or event tracking results that might not neatly fit into a single Google Analytics report.

For Visualization

Other tools skip the spreadsheet altogether and go straight for visual communication. You can put Google Analytics data into any number of graphs, charts and tables to help it tell its story more effectively.

Keep in mind that GA4 automatically visualizes some of this information for you. The idea behind these tools is to customize the visualization parameters — for example, enabling you to decide which pieces of information are compared or shown side-by-side. You also have more power over the data format; from pie charts to scatterplots, the creative choices are yours. 

For Communication and Utilization

Remember when I mentioned digital marketing platforms? These are like big whiteboards in your playroom, each with a bunch of colored dry-erase markers. They help keep track of what you’re playing with and what the results are — no matter where on the internet you’re working, which campaigns you’re focused on or how many people are involved. Better yet, many of them automatically grab data from GA4 and other sources, giving you a complete view of your progress, resources, deadlines and more.

Get Your Google Analytics On

You know what’s in the GA4 toybox. Now it’s time to crack open that lid and get your Google Analytics on. Whether you want to experiment with standard or pre-built reports or are ready to customize everything yourself, now’s your chance to turn the whole internet into a playroom.

An effective Google Analytics report can shine a spotlight on areas of improvement, enabling data driven decisions for your marketing campaigns. However you use your next GA4 report, make sure it’s exactly as cool as a life-sized, fully functioning Millennium Falcon.

With the right mix of user insights, actionable data and an acute focus on key metrics like retention report findings, you’ll have everything you need to perfect your user acquisition strategies and refine your paid search approach.

Editor’s Note: Updated July 2025.