You will be able to build free-form and funnel explorations to dig into a specific question.
Farah's trousers campaign brought plenty of visits to the product page, and few of them bought. The standard reports told her that much. What they could not tell her was where people gave up. Did they leave the product page without choosing a size? Add to cart and then abandon at checkout? Each answer points to a different fix, and guessing wrong would mean redesigning the wrong page.
Questions like that are what explorations are for. This lesson covers the two you will use most, and the limits that catch small businesses out.
Standard reports are fixed layouts that Google designed for common questions. Explorations are a separate area of GA4, under the Explore menu, where you build your own analysis from scratch. You pick the dimensions and metrics you want, drag them into a table or chart, and apply filters and segments that the standard reports do not allow.
GA4 offers several exploration techniques. The two most useful for marketing are the free-form exploration, which is a flexible table or chart, and the funnel exploration, which shows how people move through a sequence of steps. There are others, such as path exploration, which shows the routes people take from a starting page or event, and they are worth opening once you are comfortable with the first two.
A free-form exploration is where you go when a standard report almost answers your question but not quite. Farah built one with landing page as rows, device category as columns, and purchases as the value. It showed that the trousers page converted reasonably well on desktop and very poorly on mobile, which no standard report had put side by side so plainly.
A funnel exploration takes a sequence of steps and counts how many people completed each one, and how many dropped out between them. You define each step with an event or condition.
Farah's funnel has three steps:
Step 1: a session that starts on the trousers product page. Step 2: an add_to_cart event. Step 3: a purchase event.
With example figures from one month, GA4 showed 1,800 people at step 1, 210 at step 2 and 64 at step 3. So about 12 percent of people who landed on the page added something to the cart, and about 30 percent of those went on to buy. The biggest loss by far was between landing and adding to cart. The checkout was not the main problem. The product page was.
That changed her plan. Instead of switching checkout apps, she looked at the product page on her phone and found the size chart sat in a pop-up that was hard to close on small screens. Fixing that cost her an afternoon.
A funnel for a service business works the same way. For Priya's maths centre in Tampines, the steps might be a session on the trial class page, a form_start event and the generate_lead key event from module 3. A big drop between starting and sending the form suggests the form itself is too long or confusing.
Two settings matter when you build a funnel. An open funnel lets people enter at any step, while a closed funnel counts only people who started at step 1. For a marketing question about a specific landing page, use a closed funnel so the counts follow the same group of people. You can also make the funnel show elapsed time between steps, and break each step down by a dimension such as device or channel, which is how Farah would have spotted the mobile problem directly.
GA4 sometimes hides rows with small numbers to protect visitors' privacy. This is called data thresholding, and it mainly happens when Google signals are switched on or when you use demographic data such as age and gender. When it applies, GA4 shows a small warning icon and leaves out rows where the counts are low enough that someone might be identified.
On a large site you barely notice. On a small business site, where many rows have single-digit counts, thresholding can remove a large part of a table, and the totals stop adding up. If your exploration looks strangely empty or has a warning icon at the top, thresholding is the likely cause. Removing demographic dimensions from the exploration, or using a longer date range so counts get larger, often brings the rows back. Some businesses switch off Google signals for reporting for this reason; check the setting's current effects in Google's GA4 help centre before you change it.
Also remember the data retention setting from lesson 3.2. Explorations can only look back as far as that setting allows, which is another reason to extend it early.
When you create an exploration, only you can see it. Other people with access to the property will not find it in their Explore menu. That surprises teams who build a useful funnel and then tell a colleague to "go and look at it".
To share one, use the share option in the exploration itself. Others then get a read-only copy they can view or duplicate. Give each shared exploration a name that says what question it answers, such as "Trousers page: where do mobile buyers drop out", rather than the default "Untitled exploration", or the shared list soon becomes unreadable.
Explorations reward a clear question. When you build your own funnel, start from the key event at the end, the one step you know matters, and work backwards to where visitors begin.
Build a funnel exploration with three steps from landing page to key event and note the step where the most people drop out.
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