The 6 Most Important Reports in GA4

With B2B decision makers researching suppliers or buying online, Google Analytics is crucial. Google Analytics was created for the sole purpose of tracking user interactions. Once there’s a tracking code in place, all interactions can be traced, and vital information gathered. You can compare current data to historical information, watch how your site is performing, see the demographics of your users, and even how changes you’ve made affected traffic. Goals are also easy to track because you can customize which conversions you want Google to log. With the right reports, you will be able to see what parts of your site are doing well and what parts could use improvement; the hard part is figuring out the correct reports to use. We’ve put together the 6 most important Google Analytics reports for you to use to help improve your website.

1.) Tech Overview Report

Reports > User > Tech > Overview > From this screen, there is a box for “Users by Platform/Device Category.” Click “View Platform Devices” to dive into the data.

Nearly everyone uses a mobile device to quickly look up reliable information or buy products, even in the B2B world; if the website is slow or hard to use, people will find a different place to look. The Tech Overview Report is an important GA4 report that helps website owners see where pain points are on each device type. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, users won’t stay long to read about your company or offerings. Not only that, but Google will penalize you by lowering your ranking if your website is not mobile-compatible. Another interesting aspect of this report is that GA4 gives you the ability to see what kind of device people are using to view your mobile site, as well as what channel they’re entering from. To view this information, click the dropdown in the first column and adjust to the data you want to see. In addition to this, you can add additional columns using the blue + icon to narrow in on more detailed information, such as page path.

From users and engagement to events and conversions, the tech overview report will show you mobile improvement opportunities, which may lead to increased traffic and ranking.

2.) Acquisition Overview Report

Reports > Acquisition > Overview

One of the more important GA4 reports is the Acquisition Report. With the information from this report, you can see how much of your traffic is coming from specific paid versus unpaid channels- organic, paid, direct, referral, and even social media. 

When you’re on the main screen of the Acquisition Overview report, you can click into each category for more details. From there, you can see how many users you’ve had, how engaged they were, and if they converted on your site based on goal and event tracking. It’s important to know these statistics because you need to know what channels to optimize. If traffic or the engagement rate is down year-over-year, you’ll know where to start making modifications.

3.) Path Exploration

Explore > Path Exploration

Another important GA4 report is the Path Exploration. This is a custom report that needs some time to set up but is extremely useful. The summary allows you to see the most common paths users take to get to certain URLs on your website. You can also specify what URL you would like to analyze or review a reverse path – to see how users got to a specific conversion point, for example. All this information is useful for many reasons. Patterns of what’s important to users will start to be noticeable. You can see what paths and pages you should optimize and if you should add shortcuts. Another benefit of this report gives us the ability to determine what questions users have. If they are clicking back and forth between common pages, they might have questions that your content isn’t answering. Optimize these pages to keep them from landing on a competitor’s page to find answers.

 4.) Landing Pages Report

Reports > Engagement > Landing Pages 

The next report worth looking at is the Landing Pages report. If you want to see what page is most often landed on and where users are coming from, this is the report to check out. Information such as how many leads are gained from the first page a user lands on can be collected from this report. You can also see how many people land on your page and interact with your site versus those who leave right away. If a lot of users are leaving a certain page right away, you may want to make that page more engaging or lower page load time to increase retention.

5.) Engagement Overview

Reports > Engagement > Overview 

A new feature of Google Analytics when GA4 was built is engagement rate. An engaged session is a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews. The engagement rate is the percentage of engaged sessions on the website. Bounce rate is calculated differently on GA4 – it’s just the opposite of engagement rate. The engagement rate report can help drive decisions on updates to make for your website to keep users interested in your content. For example, if there’s a section of the website that performs well, what can you learn from that to apply to other pages?

6.) Conversion & Event Reports

Reports > Engagement > Events or Goals

The Conversions and Events reports are arguably the most important GA4 reports for B2B companies. Enabling enhanced measurement will allow you to easily track events such as page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, and file downloads within GA4. You can then view this data in the events report. 

When a user converts, your company has a qualified lead that is more likely to complete a purchase or request a quote. In this report, you can see what conversions happened, and add additional columns to see what pages are driving conversions and what channels they are coming from. With these customizations also comes the ability to compare recent data to historical information. This report makes it easier to see if company goals are being met and if there are areas that could be improved.

These important GA4 reports are vital tools to make the most out of your website. They will help you gain knowledge on areas such as how your mobile website is performing, where your users are coming from, how engaged users are, and how many leads certain pages are driving. All this information will give you a great start on learning how to improve your website. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We are also happy to offer a free website audit to see how you stack up against your competition.