Most people find GA4 more difficult to use than Universal Analytics, especially when trying to drill down into the data for more specific metrics.
Well, with a bit of knowledge on how to make simple custom reports, you can quickly turn GA4 into the perfect reporting tool for you.
Since there is an unlimited number of custom reports that we could make, for this example I’m just going to show the basics using the Acquisition report as our foundation report. However, you can easily take the same steps and apply them to many different reports using different metrics and filters to suit your needs.
So let’s begin… open up GA4 and find an existing report that you’d like to customise, for this example, I’m selecting the “User acquisition” report.
Click the edit pencil at the top right.
Then apply your customisations, for this I am going to add a report filter on the right column by selecting “Add filter”, I’ll select “First user default channel group” and “Organic social” then “Apply”.
This report now shows me the user traffic from Organic Social only, but the charts and tables are now insignificant. I want to change them so it compares the traffic from each Organic Social source. To do this, click dimensions at the top right, click the three dots next to “First user source” and “Set as default” then “Apply”. This will now breakdown all charts by the Source.
In the same way, you can also change the metrics that appear in the table by clicking ‘Metrics’ then add or delete metrics as you wish.
Finally, I also want to see the Organic Social medium metric in the table. So I click the + icon at the top of the first column of the table and select “First user medium” to add the additional column.
Once done, click Save at the top then “Save as new report” and give it a name.
Now your report is made you’ll want to add it to your navigation menu for easy access. To do this go back to “Reports” then “Library”.
You’ll see “Collections” ; these are just your navigation menus.
For this example we’ll add our report to the “Life cycle” collection by clicking on the three dots then “Edit”.
Search for your report in the right column then drag and drop it into the Life-cycle menu on the left panel. Click save, then “Save changed to current collection”.
Finally, if you are comfortable with these steps you can dive even further into GA4 by creating completely new reports within the Library. With these steps you can create an unlimited number of reports with an endless combination of metrics.