What Are the Standard Reports in GA4 and What Does Each One Show?
Four reports answering four questions in order. Where did they come from, what did they do, did it lead to anything and did they come back. Read as a sequence they describe one journey rather than four disconnected screens.
Four Questions In Order
The standard reporting looks like four unrelated sections and is actually one sequence. Where did they come from. What did they do. Did it lead to anything. Did they come back. Every business journey passes through those four stages in that order. The reports map onto them.
Why the order matters. It locates the problem.
Reading them in sequence tells you where things break down. Plenty of arrivals and nothing happening afterwards is a different problem from almost nobody arriving.
What reading them separately produces. Disconnected facts.
A visitor count from one screen, a popular page from another, no relationship between them. That is how most people use analytics and it is why it feels unhelpful.
Where most businesses stop. Question one.
They look at how many people came and go no further. The commercially useful information is in questions two and three.
What the sequence exposes. The weak stage.
If arrivals are healthy and nothing is happening, the site is the problem rather than the marketing. That single diagnosis is worth the reading time.
How long the sequence takes to read. Twenty minutes.
Four questions, once a month, with a note of what changed on the site. That is the whole discipline. It produces more than an hour spent wandering through screens without one.
What this page will not do. Describe screens.
The interface is rearranged periodically. What each report answers is stable, so that is what this covers.
Where They Came From
The acquisition reporting answers where visitors arrived from, split into categories such as search, direct, referral and social. It is the report businesses open first and the one carrying the largest caveat.
What it genuinely tells you. The mix.
Which routes bring more people than others and whether that balance is shifting. That is a real and useful picture of how you are found.
The caution attached to all of it. Labels are inferred.
Nobody tells the tool where a visit came from. It works it out, then places the visit in direct when it cannot. Our traffic sources guide covers what that does to the figures.
The two views worth knowing. User and traffic.
One describes where people were first found, the other where a particular visit came from. They answer different questions and comparing figures across the two produces confusion.
What to look at monthly. Proportions.
The share each category contributes, rather than the raw totals. A shift in the mix is the earliest sign something has changed.
The comparison worth making here. Sources against results.
Which routes bring people is a smaller question than which routes bring enquiries. Once results are configured, this report answers the second. The two answers are frequently different.
What not to conclude. That direct means loyalty.
A large direct figure is as likely to mean visits arriving unlabelled as it is to mean people know your name.
What They Did
The engagement reporting covers behaviour once somebody has arrived. Pages viewed, time spent and actions taken. It is the most immediately practical of the four. The useful reading within it is not the one most people take.
The obvious view. Popular pages.
Which pages were viewed most. Interesting, though it counts every view including people passing through on their way somewhere else.
The better view. Landing pages.
Which pages people actually arrived on. That tells you what the market associates you with, rather than what your navigation encourages.
What businesses discover there. A surprise.
Frequently an old article or a page nobody has thought about for two years brings in more arrivals than the service pages everybody argues over.
What to do with that. Improve what works.
A page already attracting people is the cheapest thing to strengthen. Adding a clear way to get in touch to a popular page beats writing a new one.
The measure to treat carefully. Engagement.
A page answering a question quickly looks poor by that measure while doing its job perfectly, which our bounce rate guide covers.
Where this connects. Question three.
Behaviour is only interesting insofar as it leads somewhere, which is the next report.
Whether It Led To Anything
The monetisation reporting covers results that carry a value. For most businesses opening it for the first time it is completely empty. That is not a fault. It shows nothing because nothing has been configured for it to show.
What it needs from a shop. Ecommerce tracking.
Purchases, values and items recorded properly. Our ecommerce guide covers what a complete implementation involves and why the figures never match the till.
What it needs from a service business. Values on enquiries.
Results defined and given a figure, so a repair callout and a full installation are not counted as equal. Without that, this report stays blank for a business receiving enquiries daily.
Why that surprises people. The name suggests otherwise.
Businesses assume a report about money will show money. It shows what somebody told it to record, which for most properties is nothing at all.
Whether it is worth configuring. Yes, for most.
It is the only report answering whether any of this produced work. Setting up conversions is where that starts.
The caution that travels with it. Not actual revenue.
Whatever appears here is an approximation of what was observed on the website. It is not a financial record and should never be reported as turnover.
Whether They Came Back
The retention reporting shows whether people returned after a first visit. It is the weakest of the four for most businesses reading this. Saying so saves you an afternoon working out why it is not telling you anything.
Who it genuinely suits. Repeat purchase businesses.
Subscriptions, consumables, anything bought regularly. For those, whether people come back is the central commercial question and this report addresses it.
Who it does not. Most trades.
Somebody has a boiler replaced once. They are not supposed to come back next month, so a low return rate describes the trade rather than a failure.
The measurement problem underneath. Devices, not people.
The tool recognises browsers rather than customers, then loses that recognition easily. So returning is understated, which our sessions and users guide covers.
What answers it properly. Your own records.
Invoices, bookings and your customer list. A business wanting to know its repeat rate should count customers rather than browsers.
What it can still tell a trade. One thing.
Whether people are returning several times before enquiring, which suggests a considered purchase and a longer decision period. That affects how patient you should be with your reporting rather than what to change on the site.
When to look at it anyway. Content sites.
If people are meant to return regularly to read something, this becomes relevant. Otherwise leave it alone.
The Reports Are Starting Points
The standard reporting answers general questions well and specific ones not at all. That is by design, since it has to serve every kind of website. Anything particular to your business needs building. The mistake is building it too early.
What general means here. Applicable to anybody.
How many arrived, where from, what they looked at. True of a bakery and a software company alike, which is why none of it is tailored to either.
What a specific question looks like. Yours.
Whether your commercial pages outperform your domestic ones. Whether visitors from one town behave differently. Neither is available by default.
Why not to rush into building. The default set is deep.
Most businesses never exhaust what already exists. Building reports before using the provided ones is how workspaces fill with things nobody opens.
When to build. After a question survives a month.
If you have wanted the same answer three months running and the standard set cannot give it, that is the moment. Custom reports covers doing it.
The advanced option. Rarely needed.
Free-form analysis exists for questions neither the standard nor custom reporting can answer, which most small businesses never ask.
What Is Missing From All Of Them
None of these four reports shows whether your business made any money, unless somebody configured it to. By default the whole set describes activity, which is why a property can produce a year of reporting that answers nothing a business owner actually asked.
What they describe by default. Movement.
People arriving, looking and leaving. Every figure is about traffic rather than outcome, however carefully you read it.
What is absent entirely. The telephone.
For most local businesses the enquiry happens on a call the website cannot see. No standard report will ever show it.
What partly fills the gap. Configured results.
Recording form submissions and taps on your number gets a substantial part of the picture into the reporting, which is the conversions guide.
What closes the rest. Asking.
How did you hear about us, recorded consistently. Cheap, unglamorous and more reliable than anything the tool infers.
Where to start if you read one thing. Results.
Configure what counts as an enquiry before doing anything else in this series. Every report above becomes more useful the moment you do.
Where the series sits. The hub.
All nineteen guides are on the Google Analytics guide.
Not one of them
shows whether
you made any
money.
By default the whole set describes activity. People arriving, looking and leaving. A property can produce a year of reporting without answering anything a business owner actually asked. The report named after money is usually the emptiest of the four, because nobody configured it.
How we read the standard set:
If arrivals are healthy and nothing is happening afterwards, the website is the problem rather than the marketing.
Every guide.
One tool.
Getting it installed and configured properly, reading the reports without being misled, measuring outcomes rather than activity, the advanced reporting and what to do when the numbers look wrong.
