The author’s views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is officially here. If you’re not familiar yet, GA4 is the next generation of analytics.
While it offers a bunch of new features and benefits, it can be a little daunting to learn how to use it effectively. There are numerous new reports, and finding the data you care about can take a lot of time.
In this post, I will show you a great way by which you can leverage the power of GA4 to enhance your reporting by using custom reports.
What is the need for Custom Reports?
Don’t get me wrong, the standard reports are great. They provide a lot of data. And that’s the problem. They provide a lot of data that you might not need.
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The default reports don’t provide you with important data: The default reports in GA4 provide a good overview of everything about your website. For example, it will tell you how many new users you’ve acquired. Or how many sessions your website had in a given timeframe. However, they may not give you the specific information you’re looking for in your SEO campaigns. To find something like how many users are coming from specific countries that are coming from organic mediums, you would have to go through a lot of reports. But if you make custom reports, on the other hand, this work would be much easier.
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Finding key metrics and organizing data can be challenging: Every business has different goals. Some might focus more on getting new users, and others might focus on a specific channel, while some may focus more on increasing the views on particular pages. Finding and keeping track of different metrics for different businesses is difficult in the default reports. Suppose you’re a SEO consultant handling 25 different GA4 accounts, and you need to prepare reports that will highlight the key metrics that you’re tracking. Gathering the data from default reports will take you dozens of hours and a lot of brain power.
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Presenting this data to stakeholders and ensuring your SEO suggestions are implemented can be tricky: The default reports are designed to show the general overview of data. This means that it will not provide you with the specific data that your stakeholders are interested in. The next thing is that the default reports have a ton of data in them. This makes the reports hard to understand. Stakeholders must understand the data because if they don’t feel confident about the data, it can be really hard to get your SEO recommendations implemented.
A great way to get the most out of your analytics data is to make custom detailed reports.