Unlocking GA4: 5 Crucial Reports Every Digital Marketer Should Use

This blog post contains in my opinion the top 5 GA build in reports every digital marketer should take advantage of in their daily business.

Using these reports digital marketers can take actionable insights to enhance their business strategy.

1. Realtime Reporting for Smarter Digital Business Decisions 

   
   

GA4 real-time reports offer live insights into how users are interacting with your website or app at any given moment. These reports help digital marketers and analysts monitor and respond to activity as it happens. Realtime data is valuable and helps you to understand the  immediate behaviour of your visitors. Depending on your business, this data can enrich your knowledge by optimising live campaigns or content on your website or app. In the meantime it can also be an indicator of potential issues on your platform and can help IT teams to review the current traffic on your site or app. 

GA4 realtime reports generally provide answers on your users current location, technological devices they are using, which pages they are currently viewing, what actions they do on your website or app, from which campaign source they are coming and how they interact with your digital business. Using these real-time insights, businesses can make faster, data-driven decisions, optimize user experiences on the fly, and respond to any unexpected surges in traffic or technical issues.

Below you can find an overview of the key features in GA4 real-time reports:

• User Locations & Activity: GA4 contains a map view which is showing where active users interacting with your digital business are located geographically. This can  help your business to track activity in specific regions. It is also a great opportunity to review the reach of localized campaigns.

• User Snapshot & Demographics: Realtime reports contain user characteristics like device type, location, and demographics (when available), these information provide a brief summary on your active users.

• Pages & Screen Views: This feature allows you to see which pages (or app screens) users are viewing in real-time, showing which content is currently popular and driving engagement.

• Events & Conversions: With realtime reports you are able to monitor specific user interactions of your active users. These can be conversion events (e.g. lead form submission) , e-commerce events (e.g. purchase) or custom events (e.g. login, click) 

• Traffic Sources: GA4 shows which sources (organic, direct, referral, etc.) are driving real-time traffic, allowing you to see the impact of ongoing campaigns or social media posts as users engage with your site.

2. GA4 Traffic Acquisition: Discover How Customers Get to Your Site

Traffic Acquisition report in GA4  provides insights into how users are arriving at your website or app. It indicates which channels, campaigns, and sources are driving traffic to your digital business. offering a deeper look into user acquisition pathways. 

Traffic Acquisition report is essential for optimising digital marketing strategies. By understanding which sources drive the most valuable traffic, marketers can allocate budgets and resources more effectively, target high-performing channels, and improve campaign ROI. 

Below you can find some of the insights provided in acquisition reports:

• Traffic Sources: Outline how users found your site or app.  Traffic sources are categorised by channels like Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Social, and Referral. Using traffic sources you can identify which channels bring most of your visitors and which channels play a big role or attribute to final conversions. Thereby it is highly recommended to use your own custom channel grouping by specifying your channels to measure your incoming traffic. 

• User Acquisition vs. Session Acquisition: GA4 splits acquisition metrics into two views—User Acquisition (first-time interactions with the site) and Session Acquisition (acquisition for each session, including repeat visitors). This differentiation provides insights into the effectiveness of acquisition strategies for both new and returning users.

• Detailed Source and Medium Analysis: You can see the exact sources (like Google, Facebook, or direct) and mediums (e.g., organic, CPC, referral) driving traffic. This granular view helps in assessing the impact of specific campaigns, ads, or search engine optimization efforts.

• Campaign Performance: The Traffic Acquisition report allows you to analyse traffic from different marketing campaigns, whether they’re from Google Ads, email marketing, or social media. By tagging campaigns with UTM parameters, you can track each campaign’s impact on traffic and conversions in detail.

3. GA4 Engagement Reports: See What Customers Do on Your Website or App

Engagement reports in GA4 provide insights into how users interact with your website or app. Using these reports you get a richer understanding of users behavior.

 Here’s a look at the core components of engagement reports in GA4:

• Events: In GA4, user interactions are tracked as events. Events can be any kind of user interactions like clicks, impressions, form submissions, purchases, downloads. 

Event tracking in GA4 can be implemented and customised according to your business strategy.

• Conversions: Conversions can be set up of specific events that are valuable KPI’s for your business, e.g. purchases, form submissions.The Engagement reports show how often these conversions happen, giving a clear picture of user actions that lead to business outcomes.

• Pages and Screens: This report shows which pages or app screens are mostly popular, including key metrics like views, engagement time, and engagement rate for each page or screen. 

• Engaged Sessions: This metric basically indicates the number of engaged sessions on your website or app. In  GA4 engaged sessions are defined as sessions where the user stays on the site or app for at least 10 seconds or views multiple pages or screens, or completes a conversion event. 

• Engagement Time: This metric tracks the total time users actively engage with your site or app.

4. GA4 Monetization: Identifying Your Most Favored Products in E-Commerce

Monetization reports in GA4 provide businesses an overview of how users interact with products or services offered. Analysing these reports can reveal your customers' featured products generating most of your revenue. E-commerce purchases report in GA4  tracks users' entire shopping behavior journey (from viewing a product to adding it to the cart to completing a purchase). With these reports  campaign offers can be refined or user experience on the shopping journey pages can be improved.

E-commerce purchases reports contains some of the below KPI’s:

• Revenue: Total revenue generated by purchases, which can be broken down by product.

• Items Purchased: The quantity of items sold.

• Product Performance: Data on individual products, such as product views, add-to-cart rates, purchase rates, and revenue by product.

5. Optimizing the Purchase Journey: How Well Do Customers Complete Purchases?

The Purchase Journey report in GA4 provides valuable insights to  businesses  that analyse how effectively customers navigate the buying process.

Using this report data-driven decisions can be made to streamline the purchase process, reduce cart abandonment, and improve overall conversion rates. Sdditionally it contains insights into user behavior that can inform website or app design improvements, to enchance overall customer satisfaction.

Key components of the purchase journey report are:

• Funnel Analysis: The Purchase Journey report can illustrate a funnel view, showing how many users enter at each stage of the purchasing process (e.g., product view, cart addition, checkout initiation, purchase completion). This helps identify drop-off points where potential customers abandon the process.

• Time to Purchase: This metric tracks the time it takes for users to complete a purchase after their initial interaction. Understanding the average time to purchase can help in optimizing marketing strategies and reducing friction in the buying process.

Today we have explored five crucial reports— Realtime reports, Traffic Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, Purchase Journey. All these reports offer invaluable insights that can help you optimize your strategies, understand customer behavior, and ultimately drive better results for your business.

At risewise.digital, we specialize in helping businesses harness the power of GA4 to turn data into actionable insights. If you're ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, reach out to us today for expert guidance and tailored solutions. Let’s unlock your success together!