We know that you don’t want to move from Universal Analytics (UA) to GA4. But Google is planning to retire UA shortly. So, you have no option but to move to GA4.
But don’t worry. We have got you covered.
This guide is developed to help you find the most commonly accessed reports in Universal Analytics. We will show you how to access these reports in GA4 as well.
If you are short of time, you can refer this infographic.
If you want a detailed breakdown, read along.
Following are some of the topics we will cover in this guide.
Where did my traffic come from?
How to view the source/medium report on GA4?
How to make landing page report in GA4?
We will discuss each of these in detail below.
How to find pageviews in GA4?
Follow the below steps to find pageviews in GA4.
Open GA4.
Click on Reports.
Click on Engagement inside the Life cycle tab.
Click on “Pages and screens“.
Scroll down.
Now you can see the table with pages and corresponding page views.
Where did my traffic come from?
In Universal Analytics, you’re very used to going to the source/medium, campaign, or channel grouping report to find answers to questions like “where did my traffic come from” or “what site referred to me”.
You can do this in GA4 too.
GA4 has 2 types of Acquisition reports.
1. User Acquisition: User acquisition is the campaign / source / medium/ channel of the first time that User (or cookie) has visited your site.
2. Traffic Acquisition: Traffic Acquisition report is the campaign / source / medium/channel for the session.
We will now show you how to access these reports.
Open GA4
Click on Reports.
Click on Acquisition.
Click on User Acquisition to view the user acquisition report as shown below.
Click on Traffic Acquisition to view the traffic acquisition report as shown below.
How to view the source/medium report on GA4?
Once you have reached the traffic acquisition report page, you can see that the report defaults to the Default Channel Grouping view of data. You can change this by changing the dimensions.
If you want to create the “source/medium” report from UA, it’s easy. Change the primary dimension to “source” and add a secondary dimension of “medium”.
We will now show you how to do this.
Open GA4
Click on Reports.
Click on Acquisition.
Click on Traffic acquisition
Click on the “Session default channel grouping” and change it to “Session source“.
Click on +
Click on Session Acquisition.
Select Session medium.
Now you can see the Source/Medium report on GA4.
You can further narrow down the result by using filter box. For example, here we have filtered for “organic” results.
How to make landing page report in GA4?
Follow the below steps to make a landing page report in GA4.
Open GA4.
Click on Reports.
Click on Engagement.
Click on “Pages and screens“.
Click on customize icon (pencil like) on the top right corner.
Click on Dimensions.
Click on Add dimension.
Scroll down the list until you find “Landing Page” and select it.
Click the 3 vertical dots on the right-hand side of the “Landing Page” dimension name from the list of included dimensions.
Select “Set as default”.
Click on Apply button in the bottom right corner.
Click on Save.
Click on “Save as a new report“.
Next, you’ll need to add the report to a collection.
Go to the Library section. You’ll find this icon in the “Reports” section of GA4 at the very bottom of the left-hand navigation bar.
Choose which collection to add this new report to.
It likely makes the most sense to add it to the “Life cycle” collection, into the “Engagement” topic, right next to the “Pages and Screens” report.
Click “Edit collection” for where you want to put it.
Scroll to the bottom of the list of reports on the right to find your new Landing Page report, and then drag and drop it into the topic section you want on the left column.
Click on Save on the bottom of the screen. This time, choose to “Save changes to current collection” choice so that the Landing Pages report is added to your nav collections that are already published/visible.
To see the landing page reports now, follow the below steps.
Open GA4.
Click on Reports.
Click on Engagement.
Click on Landing Page.
Scroll down. Now you can see the landing page report on GA4.
You can find the source and medium for each of the landing page by clicking on the “+” icon.
Select Session Acquisition.
Select Session source/medium.
Now you can get the Landing page report by session source/medium
How to find sessions on GA4?
Follow the below steps to find sessions on GA4.
Open GA4
Click on Reports.
Click on Engagement.
Click on Events
Click on session_start
Now you can see the sessions on GA4.
Wrapping Up
Hope you get a basic idea about how to start using GA4. This is a work-in-progress guide and we will keep on adding many more functions of GA4 in the future
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