Google Analytics 4: build a useful report in 10 minutes

GA4 isn't harder than the old Analytics, it just renamed the furniture. Skip the tour and build one report you'll open every week.

The four moves that matter

1. Set the date range to the last 30 days.
2. Turn on comparison with the previous period, so numbers have context.
3. Add one breakdown — usually session source or medium.
4. Save the view, then export it so it can be shared without logins.

Vocabulary, translated

• Event — anything that happened. Page views are events too.
• Key event (formerly conversion) — an event you decided to care about.
• Session — one visit; a user can have many.
• Engaged session — a visit that lasted, scrolled or converted. This is the honest bounce-rate replacement.

The three numbers worth watching

Where visitors came from, which pages they landed on, and how many did the thing you care about. Everything else is interesting rather than useful, at least at the start.

Two traps

• Data takes time to appear — don't judge today's numbers today.
• Your own visits inflate everything until you filter internal traffic out.

Practise before you present

Building a report while someone watches is a bad time to learn where the buttons are. Rehearsing the same four moves — range, comparison, breakdown, export — makes it a thirty-second job.