Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has emerged as the compass guiding businesses through the complexity of digital interactions, in today’s technology and data-focused world. GA4 reports offer a comprehensive view of user behavior, helping your business make informed decisions and drive desirable results. To help your business improve your business performance, here are seven GA4 reports that your business should use.
Real-Time Report
The real-time reporting feature allows your business to track website activity as it happens. Your business can use the real-time report to monitor the impact of a TV ad campaign or Google Ads campaign as actions occur on your website. The real-time report is particularly useful when you first setup GA4 property or if you have set up a new GA4 event and you want to see if the property or event has been setup correctly. You can implement tests on your website and use the real-time report to see if your GA4 property or event is working properly.
Traffic Acquisition Report
Understanding the quality and source of website traffic is essential for improving your marketing efforts and budget allocation. The traffic acquisition report offers a breakdown, showing which channels drive the most valuable traffic, helping your business to focus your efforts where they generate the highest return on investment. For example, if you see that your Organic Search traffic is contributing a substantial portion of your website conversions, you can use this insight to allocate more resources to your SEO efforts so that you can gain more SEO traffic and potentially drive more website conversions.
Events Overview
The Events Overview report shows specific interactions on a website. For example, the Events Overview report can show the number of email addresses have clicked on the website or the number of times that users have downloaded PDF files from your website.The Events Overview help you understand if users are engaging specific events on your website and what your audience is interested in. This information helps you tailor your marketing efforts and website content more closely with your audience’s interests.
Key Events Report
Tracking key events or conversions is important for measuring the success of marketing campaigns and website performance. By analyzing key events, you can see the number of times specific events such as contact form submissions or eCommerce transactions have occurred on your website. These insights help your business to understand your overall marketing and business performance and the overall trend of your business results and determine if they need to make adjustments to your marketing or website efforts.
Landing Page Report
First impressions matter, especially for websites. The landing page report analyzes visitor engagement on pages that users first visit on a website, showing areas for improvement to better user experience. For example, if you identify that a landing page has a large number of visitors but the engagement time on the page is low (e.g. a few seconds), you can look further into this situation and pinpoint reasons why the engagement time is low and come up with ways to improve the engagement time.
Pages and Screens Report
Understanding which pages your users are reading and interested in is important to optimizing your website content. For example, if you discover that a service page is gaining a tremendous amount of website traffic but very few inquiries, there’s a clear gap between the service page’s viewership and number of conversions that the service page generates. This gap could be due to the quality of the content on the service page, the audience that your business is marketing to the service page to, or everything in between. Gaining these insights helps you identify a problem and potential reasons for the problem so that you can come up with solutions to better the results.
Tech Details Report
Ensuring a smooth user experience across different devices and browsers is essential for delivering high-quality website performance. The tech details report offers insights into how users access the website. For example, the report shows which browsers or mobile devices users use to visit your website. Identifying which popular browsers or mobile devices users use to visit your website helps you understand which browsers or mobile devices your website has to optimize perfectly for so that your website can deliver smooth user-experience on these devices or browsers.
Google Analytics 4 reports offer a wide range of features to help us gain a deep understanding of our website performance and equip our businesses with the insights needed to improve our business performance in the digital world. From real-time monitoring to in-depth user analysis, these reports serve as effective tools to find new opportunities and room for improvement to better our engagement with our audiences and achieve our business goals more efficiently.
Ray is the Principal at RW Digital, an independent digital agency based in Vancouver, BC. RW Digital’s mission is to help businesses use web technologies, digital advertising, and data analytics to promote their brands and gain more clients in today’s ever-changing digital space. The agency takes pride in consistently delivering exceptional work to our clients.