What reports should you add to your GA4 collections?

Reports are an integral part of GA4, as they show you a summary of all that data being fed through your website. Anyone with access to your GA4 account, will be able to view the reports by navigating to the report tab.

A way to better organise and view your reports, you can create and edit ‘collections’; collections consist of topics, which are a set of reports, usually made up of one overview report and up to ten detailed reports.

The following will give you a run-down on collections and reports in GA4, as well as a list of reports we recommend you add to your collections.

Default collections on GA4

There are two predefined collections that appear in the report navigation by default

• Life cycle: allows you to get an understanding of the full customer experience, from acquisition to retention
• User: gives you an understanding of the demographics of your customer base, and the technology they use

Creating a collection

Alongside the default collections, you can create and customise additional collections within your property. Each property can have up to 7 collections.

To create a collection, navigate to the Library tab, and click create new collection. From here it will prompt you to either opt for starting from scratch with a blank collection, or you can select from a template. Whichever you choose, you will then be prompted to name your collection, and then create and name a new topic.

Once this is done you can start dragging reports into your topic; you can have one overview report, and up to 10 detailed reports. You can add any additional topics to your collection as desired, and each collection can have up to 5 topics.

When you choose to create a collection from a template, you will be provided with the following options:

• Life cycle: allows you to get an understanding of the full customer experience, from acquisition to retention
• User: gives you an understanding of the demographics of your customer base, and the technology they use
• App developer: focuses on the user experience in-app, and is ideal for IOs and android app developers
• Games: for app based games, this collection displays any relevant dimensions and metrics

Reports we recommend that you add to your collections:

Default reports – ensure correct set up!

When you create a GA4 profile, there are several default reports already available to you. Often, these reports are vital to your data analysis, so you are going to want to make sure they are set up correctly.

Traffic acquisition report: this report will help you identify which channel your visitors are coming from, which is vital for understanding channel performance. Within this report you can isolate channels such as paid media, organic search, Email, social media and more. The metrics for this report can also be customised, but we recommend the following metrics are included as a minimum:

• Sessions
• Users
• Events
• Conversions
• Revenue (for eCommerce websites)

Landing page report: this report allows you to see the pages that users first land on when they visit your site, allowing you to monitor performance for each of your sites pages. This report is vital for identifying areas of success, as well as underperforming areas on your site, which is why the correct set up for this report is vital.

Depending on which channel you are looking to review, you should add a filter to the ‘session medium’ and select the desired channel.

While there are several other built-in reports to GA4, the above two are vital to ensure you can monitor channel performance adequately.

Additional reports we recommend you create:

Using the explore section, you have the freedom to create a wide range of reports using any of the available metrics in GA4. There are a variety of templates available to help you to create the reports that are best suited to your business.

Google organic search queries: This report allows you to view search console metrics for queries such as clicks, impressions etc. in your GA4 property.

In order to set-up this report, you need to ensure that your GA4 property is linked to the relevant Google Search Console account. This can be done via navigating to the admin portal, and finding the Search Console Links under the properties tab.

Google Organic Search Traffic: This will display landing pages that showcase both analytics and search console metrics within the same report.

Again, just as with the above report, you need to ensure that your GA4 property is linked to the relevant Google Search Console account

Site search report: this report will help you identify what users are searching for on your site.

For this report to work, the site must have an internal site feature, which can be set up within the admin section.

Funnel Explorations: these reports help you visualise each step users take to complete a task, or conversion on your website. This gives you an analysis of each step in the process, and will allow you to see how many users are following through each step, allowing you to identify any errors in the process of concern.

Just like your business, your GA4 reports are unique…

Adding the above reports to your GA4 collections is a great way to set you up for successful data-analysis of your website, and potential customers. That being said, depending on the nature of your business, there may be additional data you want to collect that is not covered in this article. Each business is unique, and it is important to ensure that your GA4 account is set up with the best reports tailored to your business needs.