How to use GA4 – Interface guide
- owwwla
- May 6
- 11 min read
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus is said to have said that you can never step into the same river twice. Water flows, so even if we got out and immediately stepped back in, it wouldn't be the same river. Sometimes this thought comes to my mind when I open a Google Analytics 4 tab in the morning. The question pops into my head: What changed today? Has anything new been added? Has one of the options been moved somewhere? It's hard to explain to people who aren't used to Google tools constantly changing things without warning that this isn't a lack of professionalism on my part, but just the nature of Google. 🤷 So I expect that I'll be updating this article from time to time. The current version is from May 5th, 2025, and today I'm inviting you on a tour of the GA4 interface, i.e. what's where in the new Google Analytics.
There will be some comparisons to Universal Analytics, but if you have no experience with this tool, you will understand everything too. Ready to go? If you don't have time to read the whole thing at once, use the table of contents and jump to the part that interests you.
Home page
On the home page, you’ll find cards with basic traffic metrics, including the number of users, the countries they’ve connected to your site from, the most common traffic channels, and the most popular pages on your site. The time frame is automatically set to the last 7 days, but you can change it to suit your needs. The most interesting part of this Analytics section is “Recently accessed”. Here, you’ll find five reports or GA4 settings that you’ve visited before you came to the home page, even a while ago. Once you get into the habit of visiting specific reports, this section will allow you to access them without having to navigate through menus to each one.
Reports
Reports are divided into several thematic collections. This is the main change that takes some getting used to after using Universal Analytics for a while. The names are a bit different, but the content is similar, because we still measure traffic to websites (and additonally apps). 😉
Reports snapshot
This part consists of 13 cards that provide an overview of various aspects of website traffic, such as new users by the metric First user - default channel group, or user activity by cohort. I know what the faces of most people look like when they see the word "cohort" in the context of analytical data, because "what is this ancient Roman battalion doing on the Internet"? Meanwhile, in statistics, it is a group of data (in this case, users) distinguished from all users based on some common feature. So a cohort can be students who bought a course for the norskprøve exam and Monika, who teaches them, checks how often they return to her pages with support materials.
Don't get hung up on the fact that there are thirteen cards. You can add or subtract them at will by clicking the edit pencil in the upper right corner. Remember that you can save a new set of cards as a separate, new report or overwrite the current one.
Realtime
Compared to Universal Analytics, real-time data is quite compact; everything is on two pages. So we have audience size, country of entry, and events all at once, without having to switch between individual sections.
Just remember that now real time only covers the last 5 and 30 minutes for active users parameter. Other reports are not described. As a result, it is not used for testing page actions anymore. Testing is done in DebugView .
Life Cycle Collection
This is a collection of reports on what's happening on your site. You'll find data on where your users are coming from, what they're doing on the pages, and how revenue is being generated, i.e. online purchases, and separately - what percentage of users are returning to the site after a certain period of time.
Acquisition
The Acquisition section opens the general report, where you can click on the link for each card/chart to the detailed report for that information. For example, from the "Sessions by Session - default channel group" tab, you can click on the "View traffic acquisition report ->" link and go to the detailed data.
In the left-hand menu, you will then see that you have left "Overview" and the "Traffic Acquisition" report is active.
Note that User Acquisition and Traffic Acquisition are not the same. You will use the first report when you want to see where your first-time visitors are coming from, i.e. only a selected group of users. The second is for all traffic.
Engagement
The Engagement section is the equivalent of the old “Behavior” but, like the rest of the GA4 reports, it’s stripped down to the bare essentials. When you feel like you need more data, you can grab an editing pencil and modify any of the reports or create a completely new one in the Library .
After the “Overview” report that opens the list, you’ll find the familiar Events, Pages and screens, and Landing Page.
Events include all interactions with the page; from views (page_view), through enhanced measurement, i.e. automatic collection of data on clicks, scrolling, using forms, displaying videos, downloading files and searching for terms on the site, to events defined by you. And you can create as many of these events as you want, because the version of Google Analytics for websites has no limits. So if, like Jola from the psychology office, you collect appointment records, or, like Marek from Mojejchatkinadmorzem.pl, you care about contact forms, then these actions on the site will be important events for you. And from there, it's just a step to defining them as conversions (formerly: goals).
There is no Conversions or Key events report in this section. In the current version of GA4 they are related to campaigns performance and therefore set in the Advertising section.
The good news in GA4 is that you don't have to configure key events from scratch, like in Universal Analytics. A simple slider movement activates or deactivates the event as a key event in the Event settings in the property Administration.
Engagement also includes viewing individual pages on your site, so you’ll find reports on Pages and screens and Landing Pages (crucial when running campaigns that lead to specific pages). If you group your pages into categories with an additional parameter, you can use the Content group dimension in the Pafes and screens report.
Monetization
Everything related to revenue is placed in the "Monetization" section and divided into
E-commerce purchases
Purchase journey
Checkout journey
Promotions
Transactions
Events from the shopping path are presented here, such as view item, adding to cart, purchases, but also the rates of adding to cart and purchase and the number of products purchased or revenue.
It took some time before all these reports were in place but we can now use them. Just keep in mind that you need to implements all the recommended e-commerce events, including view_promotion and select_promotion to collect data in all of these reports.
If you need any other report to analyze your data, there are more options in the Explore section.
Maintenance
This is where you will start looking after collecting data for a longer period of time to see how often and for what period of time users return to your website. If, like Dominika, you provide your clients with a tool for working online, you will be very interested in whether they come back regularly or they only set up an account and forget about it.
Collection User
The User collection has been reduced to a minimum. It contains basic demographic data such as country, city, gender, interests, age, and language.
Among the technology data are: platform and platform category (e.g. web / desktop), operating system, browser, device category, screen resolution, app version, app stability, and device model. If you don't have the app, these cards will remain blank unless you remove them with the editing pencil 😉
Also, here is the Audiences report. It might be used for A/B testing tools which create a separate audience for each experiment version. Just remeber to add to the report the metrics which will be useful for the experiment evaluation, such as conversion rate of key events in session and key events number.
To use these reports efficiently, it's worth getting to know a little trick that Google used to optimize the amount of space in the menu. Check out the Protips below, where I've described a few of these non-obvious details.
Protips :
1. In the Demographics and Technologies section menu, you can only see the division into "total" and "detailed data". If you go straight to the detailed data report, you will find information about only one scope, for example, the user's country. And yet there should also be age and gender. How to find them? For detailed data reports, always go to the "total" report. There, from each mini report, you can go to the whole devoted to a given dimension. You will find the transition in the lower right corner, under the blue inscription starting with the words "Display report on (dimension name)".
2. If you've used segments a lot in Universal Analytics, remember that they're called "comparisons" here. For example, they let you compare all users and users who meet a specific condition in a report. Monika likes to use it when she checks what traffic sources all users come from versus those connecting only from Norway. This lets her see whether social media or search engines are more effective at attracting visitors to course pages in her workplace. You can find the comparisons in the upper right corner under the square icon with a chart. You have to select the dimension conditions each time, and (finally) you can also save them for later.
3. When downloading a report there are the following options: PDF, Google Sheets, CSV.
4. An interesting option that shows you a bit about how to use Analytics is Trends (top right corner of each report). This is a set of questions divided into categories. You can ask something like: On which days do I have the most users? and GA4 will answer you with a list of days of the week with the number of users on each of them, and you have everything at your fingertips. I highly recommend it if you are just starting out with website traffic analysis and don't know what to ask Analytics.
5. And now something special: each report can be moved to a different place, you can add your own separate report or a whole section . In other words, you can create your own, individual navigation. An example is creating a report of Blog pages based on the Pages and screens template with a filter.
6. In existing reports you can change the columns with dimensions and metrics/metrics. If you have a custom dimension, such as User status, registered in GA4 (Administration > Property settings > Data display > Custom Definitions), you can also add it to the report and use it as the main dimension by changing the column on the left side of the table.
7. Data in reports (except real time) will not appear until the next day. If you were expecting it to be like in Universal Analytics after fifteen minutes, you will be disappointed. Although there is "Today" in the date ranges to choose from, (for now) it does not present any data. Maybe this change is still ahead of us. 😉
Library
The last on the list of Reports sections is the Library. If you have edit access to GA4, you will find it in the menu, below all the report collections.
This is where you will find a list of all reports and collections that were created automatically or added to your service manually. You can also create your own collection of reports here if the current ones do not suit you in terms of the data presented or the combination of cards and charts.
Newly published collections will appear in the left menu, sorted alphabetically.
If you modify any of the basic reports and save them as new, you can check here which template they were created from.
Explore
This is your “rough and tumble” board. Here you can create the kind of detailed report you need at any given time. There are several types of exploration templates: freeform (table), funnel (mark the points that must be included in completing a funnel on your site), funnel sequence (also known as “flows”), segments (overlapping subsets of data), user behavior explorer, cohorts (specific user behavior over time), and user lifecycle. There are also additional templates in the gallery.
Explorations are quick to create and share. Unfortunately, only the creator can edit them. They are sometimes used to create a report with custom data that GA4 collects from tags but doesn't show in any of the core reports.
When an exploration is no longer needed, it can be deleted.
I will devote a separate article to explorations, because their use is not particularly intuitive. However, once you get the hang of the basics, your only limitation will be your own imagination. 😉
Advertising
This section presents data only if your GA4 property is linked with Google Ads account. It'r the first time when Google requiers using a paid tool for accessing some data in Analytics. Why? Becasue without Google Ads you have no access to the key events reports even if they come from organic campaigns.
Note that in this part of the GA4 property the reports attribution is data-based.
Attribution
In attribution reports, you can compare the impact of individual channels on key events, thanks to the attribution model comparison tool, and track multi-channel conversion paths, i.e. which channels users came to you through before they converted (for example, by signing up, submitting a form, or making a purchase). If they visited your site multiple times, you might notice a pattern indicating that they most often came first from a paid campaign, then from organic search, and finally went directly to the site address? Or maybe most of your customers come and convert after receiving a newsletter with a discount on purchases?
Planning
These reports are divided into two versions: All channels and Google Ads. Both of them display data regarding campaigns and their performance. In All channels you will find all campaigns (paid and non-paid), while in Google Ads only those from the Google advertising tool. Ads data regarding cost and clicks are imported into GA4, but for data from other tools (i.e. Meta) you need to upload them manually.
Tools
Keeping all in one place - here you can see which key events are exported to Google Ads and what are the audiences (segments) sizes for Search, YouTube, DIsplay and Gmail, so you don't need to go to your Ads account for checking it.
Administration
Account
No changes here; you set it, it applies to your entire Google Analytics account.
Property
In the basic version of GA4, views are gone, so all the settings are in the Property column. For detailed guidance on property settings, see my published GA4 Checklist .
Additionally, as I mentioned, this is now where you’ll also find a configuration space for events, conversions, audience lists, and custom definitions (i.e., registering custom dimensions and metrics that are sent from your website to GA4).
This is also where you will come when you want to test whether data is flowing into Analytics correctly. There is a separate GA4 element for this, the Debug View.
DebugView
This element is activated when you use Tag Assistant (i.e. when Preview is enabled in Google Tag Manager).
Here, on the vertical timeline, you will see all the events sent from the website and received by GA4. When you click on an event on the timeline, a box will appear with its detailed parameters.
Three types of icons: a blue circle with a pointing finger, a green circle with a flag, and a red circle with a beetle help distinguish normal events from key events and errors at a glance. There’s also a list of events from the last 30 minutes on the right, so you know what to look for when you scroll down the long timeline.
Note: DebugView may take a minute or more to start after you launch Preview in GTM. I recommend being patient. 😉
My preferences
Don't forget that through Administration you can also access user settings, where you can configure the language of the Google Analytics interface, the default report date range and the settings for (email) notifications from Google Analytics. In the current situation, it is worth checking "Information about new features" to know at least about some of the changes and shifts in GA4 before entering your service 😉
It took us a long time to even briefly navigate the interface of the current version of GA4. I’ll focus on select topics in the next articles, so it’ll be easier to learn. But you can always come back here and check out where are specific options if you forget in the meantime.
Check out the next articles to see the details of the new tool. They will be available in the Knowledge Base soon.
Additional materials (click to go)
Knowledge base:
If you have any questions or topics that I haven't covered here that you're particularly interested in, please write to me and I'll be happy to help.
Owww
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