Go straight to the GA4 report that shows where visitors came from, what they did and whether they acted.
GA4 has many reports. It's easy to open several of them looking for one number and come away with figures that don't agree. A handful of reports answer most everyday marketing questions, and if you know which question each one answers, you can go straight to it.
Farah owns a shop that sells online. On a Monday morning her business partner asks whether last week's Instagram push brought anyone to the shop. She opens GA4, clicks through four reports and finds three different numbers for Instagram. Twenty minutes later she answers "probably". Her partner is not impressed, and neither is she. The answer she needed was in traffic acquisition, with the date range set to last week and the report filtered to the instagram source. Starting there would have taken a minute.
These are five common questions and the reports that answer them:
Where did this visit come from: the traffic acquisition report. How did new people first find us: the user acquisition report. What did people do: the events report and the pages and screens report. Where did they land: the landing page report. Did they act: the key events column and, for online sellers, the monetisation reports.
Once the right report is open, you can sharpen it with a comparison, a secondary dimension, or both.
Google rearranges GA4's menus from time to time. Newer properties also group reports into collections with names like "generate leads" or "drive online sales". If your menu looks different, search for the report names used here.
The traffic acquisition report groups sessions by the source that brought each visit. Each row is a channel group, such as Organic Search, Email or Paid Social. The columns include sessions, engaged sessions, key events and more. Because it counts sessions, a person who visited three times appears three times, each time under the source that brought them on that visit.
Channel group is the default main dimension. If you change it to session source and medium, you see the detail behind each channel, such as instagram and social, newsletter and email, or google and cpc. The UTM tags you set up in module 2 appear in this view. If you change the main dimension to session campaign, you see each campaign by name.
The user acquisition report groups users by the source of their very first visit. It keeps that first source however they come back later. Say a customer first finds Farah's shop through an Instagram post, then comes back twice from her newsletter. Traffic acquisition shows one Instagram session and two email sessions. User acquisition shows one user from Instagram. The two reports often disagree, and both are correct because they measure different things. Use user acquisition to find which channels bring in new people. Use traffic acquisition to find which channels bring visits in a given period.
The engagement reports answer this. The events report, introduced in lesson 3.1, lists every event and how often it happened. The pages and screens report shows which pages people viewed and for how long. The landing page report shows the first page of each session, with the key events that followed.
For marketing, the landing page report is often the most useful of the three, because the landing page is where your ad, email or post sent people. Suppose Farah's trousers campaign sent people to a product page that got plenty of sessions and almost no purchases. The problem is probably on the page rather than in the campaign.
Most acquisition and engagement reports include a key events column. A dropdown at the top of that column lets you choose which key event to show. You can then see enquiries or purchases by channel, by campaign or by landing page in the same table.
For online sellers, the monetisation reports cover what was sold. The e-commerce purchases report is a ready-made detail report that shows information about the products or services you sell, so for Farah's shop it shows which products sold. Google's Analytics Help page for this report explains what it shows and which events your site needs to send for it to work. Traffic acquisition with the purchase key event selected shows which channels brought the buyers.
Most questions don't need a new report. They need one of two adjustments to a report you already have open.
The first is a comparison, which splits the whole report by a condition. Every standard report can take one. You might compare mobile with desktop, Singapore with other countries, or new with returning users. You can also compare date ranges, for example last month against the month before. A number with nothing to compare it to tells you very little, and a comparison is the quickest way to give it context.
The second is a secondary dimension. In the report table, click the small plus sign beside the main dimension and choose a second breakdown. If you open traffic acquisition by channel and add landing page as the secondary dimension, you see which pages each channel sends people to. If you open the landing page report and add session source, you see where each page's visitors came from.
With these in place, Farah's twenty-minute search becomes a routine she runs on Monday mornings, which she sums up as three clicks, one answer. She opens traffic acquisition and sets the date range to last week, with a comparison to the week before. She switches the main dimension to session source and medium, then picks purchase in the key events column.
You will build the same habit with your own data, starting with three questions most owners ask every month.
Open your own GA4 data and answer three questions: which channel brought the most sessions last month, which landing page had the most key events, and which campaign brought in new users.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).