2 Ways to Customize Reports in Google Analytics 4

Discover the two report types offered in GA4 and why customization is limited in one of them.

Two Report Types

Google Analytics 4 has two distinct types of reports including:

• Standard Reports
• Explore Reports

Standard Reports

You will find these under the Reports tab.

There are 3 main sections, including:

• Lifecycle Collection
  • Acquisition
  • Engagement
  • Monetization
  • Retention
• User Collection
  • Demographics
  • Tech
• App / Developer Collection

These are “made for you” reports of what Google thinks is the most important data you will want to see.

Users in Standard Reports

The main focus of the Standard Reports is clearly on New Users, which are first-time visitors to your site.

That is unfortunate, as most bloggers are trying to build tribe and the want to see both New and Returning Users.

In fact, in snapshot type reports, what  bloggers want to see most are total visitor count and their top performing pages/posts.

You have to dig drill down into the Pages and Screens report to see that – it’s not on the main GA4 dashboard by default.

While you can change the main Dimension used on a Standard Report from something like Default Channel Group to Source so you can see the individual sources of traffic to your site, you can’t change from First User to Total Users.

At best you can see Active Users, which GA4 Standard Reports just label generically as Users.

Bottom line, there is no way to customize many of the Standard Reports to show Total Users by default.

Sessions in Standard Reports

The Dimension Sessions has a slightly different meaning in Google Analytics 4 than in Universal Analytics (UA).

In GA4, it means that something opened a page/post on your site. That could be a human visitor or a bot that actually rendered the page instead of just reading the HTML code.

Sessions in GA4 do include both New and Returning Users to your site.

However, Engaged Sessions in GA4 are those that lasted for more than 10 seconds, and those are more likely to be humans rather than bots.

A few of the Standard Reports do show:

• Total Sessions
• Engaged Sessions
• Engagement Rate which is a ratio of Total to Engaged Sessions
• Average Engagement Time – which is the same as Duration, or Time on Site in UA

But, you can’t see all of these together in a snapshot that also shows the pages where visitors are spending the most or least amount of time on your site.

Limits of Customizing Standard Reports

GA4 has a feature to allow you to use one of the Standard Reports as a template to customize it to suit your needs.

However, the Dimensions and Metrics available are quite limited. In other words, you can’t use every type of thing you want to measure in each report – like splitting out New, Returning, Active, and Total Users.

Nor can you apply every type of Metric for the data totals you want to see, like the 4 session metrics mentioned previously.

What you can do is turn off the useless graphs at the top so you can quickly get to the table data.

And then you can move or hide the order of what’s in that table.

Standard Reports Overviews

And here’s the real kicker.

Cards are what GA4 calls the little snapshots of data that allow you to quickly see your Metrics.

Even when you do find the Dimensions and Metrics that you want to add to your Cards in your new customized Standard Report copy, some of them will not be available in that new report.

They will only be available to see in that report’s Overview tab.

Bottom Line – why in the world would you spend much time moving around data in a Standard Report that doesn’t really tell you what you want to know?

Full Customization in Explore Reports

Fortunately, Google Analytics 4 also offers Explore Reports.

Here you can build any custom report you want, any way you want it.

And all 156 Dimensions and 160 Metrics are available to add to the report.

Build Master Reports Quickly

On top of that, you can build master reports for anything, including:

• Acquisition
• Engagement
• Clicks – yes, clicks

And then each one of those mater reports can have multiple tabs of data.

For example, I built a master Acquistion report with tabs to show:

• Top pages by total Users
• Top pages by Channel Grouping (like Organic Search, Organic Social, Organic Video)
• Top pages by referrer (like Pinterest, Facebook, Google, etc.)
• To Sources (referrer) broken out into Sessions, Engaged Sessions, Duration, etc.
• Top pages by individual referrer (like Pinterest, Facebook, Google, etc.)
• Top pages by New, Returning, and Total Users
• Top pages by Channel Grouping and split into New, Returning, and Total Users

And then I built a master Engagement Report with tabs to show:

• Top pages by total Sessions and Engaged Sessions
• Top pages by Views, with Views per User and Average Engagement Time
• Page Flow (like Behavior Flow in UA)
• Landing page split into Sessions, New/Returning Users, Average Engagement Time
• Top pages by Entrances and Exits (like Bounce Rate in UA)
• Top pages by Engagement rate, Bounce rate, and Average Engagement Time

And then I built a master Click Report with tabs to show:

• Top pages by click, including link clicked
• Clicks on my affiliate links
• Path Flow, starting with a click and the visitor’s full journey through the site

Don’t Buy GA4 Templates

It was hard to build new reports in Universal Analytics.

That’s why it was better to buy ready-made templates for specialty data – like seeing all of your traffic from Pinterest.

But it’s super easy and fast to build custom Explore Reports in Google Analytics 4.

GA4 even gives you multiple report templates to get you started.

So, there’s no reason to purchase ready-made templates. 

Plus, GA4 is under active development. Google luck finding templates that stay updated.

By creating your own, when GA4 adds a new feature, Dimension, or Metric, you can quickly add it yourself – or build a whole new report around it.