Google Analytics 4 Tutorial in 10 mins | Quick Start Guide to GA4

Key Takeaways

one of the biggest complaints I hear from my students is that Google anex 4 is super confusing and just overwhelming when you're starting out as a beginner and I'll be honest even though I have more than 10 years of experience in digital marketing a few years ago when G4 launched I was avoiding transitioning to it because it was just too much hassle so in this quick tutorial I will teach you the basics of Google LX 4 you will learn how to use the G4 reports what reports are useful and when to use because you can basically ignore half of the reports in gf4 but you need to know which half hello my name is Robert and I'm here to help you understand and analyze data to make better decisions in eCommerce so let's just jump into ga4 dashboard so this is the Google nx4 dashboard and this is the demo account that Google provides and if you want I'll leave a link to this page where you can just come here scroll down and you click on this link you get access to this same uh property now this is the homepage page and this kind of summary page of what's going on on our side this is a nice way but you're not going to spend that much time here what you're going to do is go into the reports and this is where the default reports live we have here the report snapshot which is again kind of summary and then you have the real time report which basically just shows who's on your side right now and what are they doing there if we take a on the left we have quite a lot of different reports but luckily we don't need half of these because some of them are quite useless but I'm going to show you you the most important ones and by the way if your names are slightly different don't worry for example here I have another website where it's called generate leads but when you open it it has the same reports inside they just might be in different order because you can change the order and you can personalize this to your website but that's more advanced and you can do that in the library section here but in any case if I go to this property which are the most important reports well we first off have this traffic acquisition and this just tells us what source brought the user to the site is that from Google search email or just paid advertisement so this is where you would find out about it then we have another one here engagement and I would look at pages and screens and landing pages the landing page report just answers the question what was the first page that the visitor saw and pages and screens tells you what pages were visited overall so basically um if I come to a homepage and then I go to a product page I will be counted as one visit to homepage in landing page but you will not see me as a part of the product page however here you will be counted as one homepage and one product page and then we have monetization under here what's useful is the e-commerce purchases this is where you get answers to questions like what products have been viewed added to card and purchased from our site so it's really focusing on the product side then we have the purchase Journey which is basically where do people abandon our site then we have checkout Journey which is basically same as purchase Journey but really focuses on the checkout uh process and then you have promotions where you can see how your promotions and do on your site not coupon codes promotions in G4 just means any type of a promotions you have on your side like banners and stuff like that but you need you need to have a separate setup for that so if you just installed G4 and nobody has installed the promotions then you probably won't see anything in there and then uh retention I would completely ignore and then you have search console this is something you can install uh and then you see data from your Google search console and then you have the user data here so for example user attributes uh demographic details like uh the country they came from and later on when you set up audiences you can see them here and for the tech uh basically you can see here what browser people use uh What uh device they use is that a mobile device desktop or tablet and this is where you could see that but these reports I usually take a look maybe once a year or once in a half a year so I don't use them as much the most used ones are the traffic acquisition then you have landing page pages and screens and e-commerce purchases and purchase Journeys and there's a few other reports that I also use uh just so you know these are the default reports but you can also create your own reports in the explore and this is really powerful feature of G4 but it is a little bit more advanced I would definitely get to know first the uh default reports and this is just so important that I covered this in depth in one of the first modules in my ga4 for e-commerce course that is just designed for people in e-commerce who want to turn data to Insight I'll add a link to that in the description of this video so next let's take a look at one of the default reports so that you get a bit familiar with the interface because it's more or less the same for all of them so I'm I'm here now in the landing page report and if I scroll down I see this graph and then you have the uh table here now this table is where the magic is happening and once you understand the metrics here so metrics are the ones where you have numbers and then you have here Dimensions this is how they're calling it in in G4 dimensions are landing pages or campaign or the source people came from uh these are kind of Dimensions that you cannot just quantify it's usually in text format where's the metric are numbers so obviously before you do anything here I would take a look at what dates you're looking at so right now I've selected February and March however you can change from here just by selecting here you also have some presets here and also if you want you can compare two dates to each other so if you select here compare you have some presets or you can also just select from here you see you have two different um sections here and the orange SL yellow kind of is the comp what are you comparing with that's the past dates usually and if I apply this you'll see that the data changes and you have the dates here quite clearly in this way it's easy to compare dates to each other just to make it simpler I'm just going to disable this and then let's take a look at the T table so what does this tell us well this is our most popular page by sessions if you click on any of these it will give you more information about that metric but also you can sort them if you click on this little arrow now there's still there so much information here and I like to just focus on this one Classic Plus collectible let's let's uh filter so there's this search field if I type here and hit enter now it will filter out by those words so you see that's the only URL that has that okay now we can focus on this and we can see hey we have these metrics here sessions users all of this now this tutorial is really short and I don't have time to go through all of this but if you want a cheat sheet and explanation of what each of them means you can just grab it the link will be in the description and this way you have a easy way to always look up what do they mean because sometimes when you click on these they don't really explain what they mean but this is where you would basically look at the data and you can also update what you see here and later on when you get more comfortable with j4 you can also add different metrics here you can remove some that you like and add the ones you want and you can do it there there will be a little pen icon here if you have the rights for example here on my website I have it here so I could Now update this report sometimes when you look at this landing page for example I want to add another dimension here and I can click on this little plus and I can add secondary Dimension and in this case I want to add something called source and I like to look at the session Source SL medium if I click on it you can see that here this is where people came from to this specific page so we have referral traffic from this website and then here we have also uh Twitter this is also a referral of traffic and we have here email and this is the campaign name so so you can start seeing where do we get this traffic and then also if you come here you have some of these Dimensions have this drop down if you select purchase from there it's just going to filter out this data this specific column by purchase events this is what we want to know this is how many purchases we got from these individual Pages broken down by Source medium same thing here if we select purchase we're going to see the conversion rate for this specific uh page now I also want to mention that you can hear there's also pagination so sometimes you have a lot of rows here uh by default it just shows 10 so you can change that to 250 now unfortunately every time you change the reports you need to set that again and then one more thing I want to show you that we have here filtering options so if I choose a filter from here I can build a quick filter let's say I want to see only mobile traffic I'm going to just type in device category this is how googlex calls it and here exact matches and now we can select mobile this means there's a apply button here it's just a bit hidden this means this report is now filtered by Mobile Traffic only so all of these numbers that we see is uh filtered and you can see the filter here you can also instead of just filtering you could remove it and then add comparison for example we could do the same comparison these are presets but basically we could do mobile traffic and the desktop traffic and don't worry you can also add your own comparisons here and you can create a new one from here and if I click now on apply I just want to show you how it looks like you can see that these two are now applied so Mobile Traffic web traffic and orange one is mobile and now we can see hey we have much more Mobile Traffic than web traffic which makes sense that's kind of the case nowadays and this way you can just easily compare data to each other and this is the traffic acquisition report and here I just want to show you that some of the reports give you the options to change the primary Dimension so instead of looking at the channel groups you can look at source and medium and Source platform this kind of this kind of depends what the report you're looking at and by the way the channel grouping is really important part of G4 basically GA takes uh the all the traffic and depending where they came from like email or search engines it groups them into different buckets so if you want to learn what those buckets mean then you can just check out the video here in the top right corner there's a separate tutorial just on this okay now you're familiar with G4 reports but to get actionable insights from the data you need to know how to turn the data into insights that's why you should watch this video next where I'll share my easy six-step system to turn data into insights