How to Read Google Analytics Reports | Key Metrics and What to Check
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Category: Web Analytics
Authors: Shusaku Yosa
You've opened Google Analytics (GA4), but there are so many report screens that many people feel they don't know where to look. GA4 reports are split across several screens from the left-hand menu, each with its own numbers to check and its own role. This article walks through which GA4 standard report screens to open and what to check on each, in the order they appear in the actual menu. Rather than how to build reports or how to compile metrics, it focuses on the navigation for opening the admin screens and reading the numbers.
Clicking Reports in the GA4 left-hand menu gives you access to each of the standard report screens. As a big-picture overview, it helps to keep in mind that the reports are organized into the following groups.
Reports snapshot: a summary dashboard that gathers the key numbers onto a single screen
Realtime: activity happening right now (the past 30 minutes / 5 minutes)
Life cycle: the four topics of Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention
User: the two topics of user attributes and technology
Life cycle is a classification that follows the flow of a user (arriving, acting within the site, reaching a result, and returning), while User is a classification of attributes (what kind of person the visitor is and in what environment they are viewing). Below, we explain how to read each screen from the top down.
The first thing shown when you open Reports is the reports snapshot. Numbers like users, sessions, main acquisition channels, and popular pages are gathered into a card layout on a single screen, letting you grasp the overall condition of the site at a glance.
It's a screen well suited to the habit of looking here first whenever you open GA4. Each card has a link to a detailed report, so clicking a number that catches your eye takes you straight to the relevant life-cycle screen. The cards displayed can be customized by the administrator, and you can arrange up to 16 of them.
The realtime report lets you check the status of users visiting the site in the past 30 minutes and the past 5 minutes. Because it updates every few minutes, it's the screen for monitoring what is happening on the site right now.
The main items you can check are as follows.
Active users in the past 30 / 5 minutes (minute-by-minute trend)
The regions users are in right now
The first user's source/medium (where they are arriving from)
The page titles being viewed right now
The events and key events occurring
In practice, you use it to check whether traffic is rising right after a social post or email send, or to confirm that events are firing correctly after changing a GA4 measurement setting. Thinking of it as a screen suited to checking reactions right after an action or verifying that things work, rather than for day-to-day analysis, makes it easier to use appropriately.
From here we're into the four life-cycle topics. You open the acquisition report from Reports then Acquisition, and check which channels and sources users arrived from. Beneath Acquisition are two further screens, User acquisition and Traffic acquisition, which look at different things.
User acquisition: looks at where new users first came from (the initial touchpoint)
Traffic acquisition: looks at where each session originated, regardless of new or returning
The basic approach is to look at the users and sessions for each default channel group (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, Organic Social, and so on) and grasp which acquisition paths are growing or declining. On this screen you track whether the numbers for a channel you want to strengthen with a particular effort are actually moving.
You open the engagement report from Reports then Engagement, and check how users behaved within the site. The screens you open most often in practice are the following.
Overview: a summary of overall behavior, such as views, event count, and average engagement time
Events: how many times each event occurred; you also check the status of key events (formerly conversions) here
Pages and screens: which pages are viewed a lot, and where users linger or leave
Landing page: the results for each page users first landed on
Among these, Pages and screens is an important screen directly tied to evaluating content. By looking not only at view counts but also at per-page average engagement time and key event counts, you can identify issues such as pages that are read but don't lead to results. Entering conditions in the search box also lets you narrow down to a specific page.
You open the monetization report from Reports then Monetization, and check data related to site results such as e-commerce purchases and ad revenue. For an e-commerce site, you track things like purchase counts, purchase journeys, and revenue by product here.
However, to display numbers in the monetization report, additional setup such as e-commerce measurement and sending item data is required. On sites that haven't set this up it will be empty, in which case you substitute the key event count in the engagement report to check results. It's a lower-priority screen for sites without direct revenue, such as BtoB sites or information media.
You open the retention report from Reports then Retention, and check how much users are returning and sticking. You can see the ratio of new users to repeat users, and the subsequent engagement trend for cohorts of users acquired on the same day.
It's a screen used to evaluate ongoing relationship-building, such as whether visits are ending after a single time and whether efforts to raise the repeat rate are working. You check it when you want to look beyond just increasing new users through acquisition and see retention as well.
Separate from life cycle is the User classification, where you check what kind of people the visitors are and in what environment they view the site. It's divided into the following two topics.
User attributes: the visitor profile, such as age, gender, region, and interests
Technology: the viewing environment, such as device, OS, browser, and screen resolution
User attributes helps with persona setting and considering ad targeting, while Technology helps with optimizing smartphone display and spotting layout breakage on specific browsers. Technology is a GA4-specific classification that did not exist in UA.
There are many screens and it's easy to get lost, but narrowing down the items to check routinely makes operations run smoothly. To start, we recommend building the habit of running through everything from acquisition to results in the following flow.
In the snapshot, grasp the overall increase or decrease in users and sessions
In Acquisition (Traffic acquisition), see which channels are rising or falling
In Engagement (Pages and screens), check well-viewed pages and where users leave
Check whether results are coming through via the key event count, in Monetization or Events
On any of these screens, looking at period comparisons (month-over-month, year-over-year) alongside single-month numbers makes the meaning of increases and decreases easier to read. When you need deeper analysis that the standard reports can't cover, you move on to the Explore feature, which allows custom analysis.
GA4 reports are structured so that you grasp the whole in the snapshot, see the current situation in realtime, follow the user flow through life cycle (Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, Retention), and understand the visitor profile through User (attributes, technology). Once you've memorized what's on which screen, you'll no longer get lost over where to find the number you want.
Start by building the habit of checking in the order snapshot, acquisition, engagement, results every time, and dig deeper into each topic as needed; this is how you'll be able to put reports to work in practice.
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