GA4’s reporting section is confusing at first sight: dozens of reports and hundreds of metrics. In day-to-day work, five or six screens are enough. This post shows those screens and which question each one answers.
GA4 has two separate worlds: Reports (ready-made reports — quick answers) and Explore (Explorations — you build your own question). For daily monitoring, the Acquisition → Traffic acquisition and Engagement → Landing page reports; for deep analysis, funnel and free-form explorations. If you want to see where your traffic really comes from, put UTM tags on all your ad links.
The value of reports depends on the quality of measurement — if events aren’t set up properly, the report will be empty too. For the concepts read what GA4 is, for setup GA4 setup, and for events events and the dataLayer.
Reports vs Explore — which one when?
Reports — ready-made reports
- The question is standard: how many visitors, from where, which page
- Opens instantly, no waiting
- Doesn’t depend on the data retention period
- Limited options for customisation
- For daily and weekly monitoring
Explore — Explorations
- The question is yours: at which step do people drop off
- You put dimensions and metrics together freely
- The data retention period applies here (2 or 14 months)
- Segments, funnels and path analysis are possible
- For deep analysis once or twice a month
Practical rule: Reports answer “how many?”; Explore answers “why?”.
The structure of the reports menu
Realtime
Acquisition
Traffic acquisition
User acquisition
Engagement
Pages and screens
Landing page
Events
Monetization
Retention
ReportThe question it answers
Traffic acquisitionwhere did the session come from?
User acquisitionwhat first brought the user?
Landing pagewhich page did they land on?
Pages and screenswhich pages get read?
Eventswhich event, how many times?
Retentiondo they come back?
The difference between Traffic acquisition and User acquisition: the first shows the source of every session, the second the source that brought the user the first time. Similar at first glance, but completely different numbers for decisions.
Where does traffic come from: channel groups
GA4 automatically splits incoming traffic into channels. The most common ones:
| Channel | What it means |
|---|---|
| Organic Search | Free traffic from Google and other search engines |
| Paid Search | Google Ads search ads |
| Organic Social | Regular posts on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn |
| Paid Social | Meta and other social media ads |
| Direct | Traffic from people typing the address directly, or with an unrecognised source |
| Referral | People coming from a link on another site |
| From email campaigns (only recognised correctly with UTM) |
The Direct channel often means “unknown”. The main causes: ad links without UTM tags, clicks from messaging apps (WhatsApp, Telegram) and links from an https site to an http site. If Direct is above 40%, the first thing to check is your UTMs.
UTM tags
These are parameters added to the end of ad and email links. GA4 reads the source from exactly these:
https://namigpashayev.com/en/services/meta-ads ?utm_source=instagram // source: which platform &utm_medium=paid_social // type: paid/free, in what format &utm_campaign=august_meta // the campaign name &utm_content=video_a // which creative (for A/B tests) &utm_term=meta_ads // keyword (in search ads)
- Always write in lowercase.
Instagramandinstagramare two separate sources in GA4. - Keep a fixed dictionary. If you write
paid_socialone time andcpcanother, the report gets fragmented. - Don’t put UTMs on your own site’s internal links. It breaks the session and loses the source.
Explorations (Explore): 7 techniques
| Technique | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Free form | Building your own table: putting any dimensions and metrics side by side |
| Funnel exploration | Seeing where people drop off between steps |
| Path exploration | Following the user’s real route from page to page |
| Segment overlap | Seeing how much two or three segments overlap |
| Cohort exploration | Following the later behaviour of a group that arrived in the same week |
| User lifetime | Measuring a user’s value over their whole lifetime |
| User explorer | Seeing a specific user’s steps one by one |
Limits: one user can save up to 200 explorations per property, and the number of shared explorations is 500. One exploration can use 10 segments and 10 filters per tab.
The one used most in practice: funnel analysis
A typical funnel for a service website looks like this:
1. Page entry1,000 people
↓ 62% drop-off
2. Scrolled to 90% of the page380 people
↓ 68% drop-off
3. Touched the form (form_start)120 people
↓ 63% drop-off
4. Form submitted (generate_lead)44 people
The most expensive step in this funnel is 2→3: of the 380 people who read to the end, only 120 touched the form. So the problem isn’t traffic but where the call to action is and how clear it is. The numbers are for illustration.
That’s exactly the value of a funnel: it turns the complaint “conversions are low” into the question “at which step are they low”. And the answer is usually not in the ads but on the page itself.
Comparisons and segments
Every report has an Add comparison button at the top. With it you put two groups side by side on the same screen — for example mobile and desktop, or organic search and paid ads.
The three most useful comparisons:
- Mobile vs desktop. If the conversion gap is big, the problem is the mobile experience.
- New vs returning visitors. If conversion is very low among new visitors, the site doesn’t build trust.
- By channel. People from organic search are usually higher quality than those from paid ads — if the numbers confirm this, the budget split should change.
6 numbers to track in a monthly report
| Metric | Where | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions (by channel) | Traffic acquisition | Is traffic growing or standing still |
| Engagement rate | Traffic acquisition | The quality of incoming traffic |
| Key events | Traffic acquisition / Events | How many real leads there were |
| Session key event rate | Traffic acquisition | Which channel gives more customers |
| Top landing pages | Landing page | Which content works |
| New users | User acquisition | Is the audience growing, or are the same people coming back |
If you record these six numbers in the same format every month, in three months you’ll have a trend — and you’ll make decisions based on trends, not gut feeling.
Looking at a report every day isn’t analytics. Analytics starts with a question: “what will I change this month?” A report that doesn’t answer it just takes up time.
Why is there so much “Direct” traffic in GA4?
Because Direct also means “source unknown”. The most common causes: no UTM tags on ad links, clicks from apps like WhatsApp and Telegram (they don’t pass on source information), and offline sources like PDFs and QR codes. Putting your UTMs in order reduces this share significantly.
What’s the difference between Traffic acquisition and User acquisition?
Traffic acquisition shows the source of every session: if someone first came from Instagram and then from Google, both are counted separately. User acquisition shows the source that brought the user the first time. Look at the second when evaluating new audience acquisition, and the first when monitoring daily traffic.
Why don’t I see old data in Explorations?
Because Explorations are subject to the data retention period. In free GA4 this period is 2 or 14 months, with 2 months as the default. As soon as you open a property, raise it to 14 months under Admin → Data settings → Data retention — this setting doesn’t work retroactively.
What does “(not set)” mean in a report?
It means GA4 couldn’t get a value for that row. The cause can vary: the parameter wasn’t sent, the custom dimension was registered after the event, or the data was hidden because of thresholding. If the share of “(not set)” is large, the measurement setup needs to be checked again.
Can GA4 reports be emailed automatically?
Yes. You can schedule delivery from the share button at the top of each report. A more flexible option is Looker Studio: you connect GA4 as a source, gather the metrics you want on one page, and the report updates automatically.
What is the realtime report for?
Not for daily decisions — for checking. After setting up a new event, when a campaign goes live or when the site changes, it’s the fastest place to see that everything works. For trend analysis the realtime report is useless.
How many explorations can I save?
One user can save 200 explorations per property, and the limit for shared explorations is 500. One exploration can use 10 segments and 10 filters per tab. In practice these limits are hard to reach — the more common problem is a pile-up of old, unnamed explorations.
Conclusion
Learning GA4 reports doesn’t mean memorising every screen. If you know the difference between the two sections (ready-made reports and Explorations), how traffic is split into channels and how funnel analysis works, 90% of the reports open up for you. The rest depends on your specific question.
The next step — advanced features: key events, attribution, audiences, Google Ads and BigQuery. If you’d like me to build the reporting system for your business — the analytics and tracking page or the get a quote form.
Source: Google official documentation — Explorations and limits, data retention.
