Google Analytics 4 for Beginners: Read Your First Report
Updated · By Robert Breen
The problem
Your manager asks a simple question on Monday: "Which channel sent us the most customers last month, and is our blog traffic any good?" The company uses Google Analytics 4, you have view access, and you have never opened it.
What you’ll be able to do
In about 15 minutes, using Google’s free demo account so nothing can break, you will open the report that answers "where do visitors come from", compare channels on engagement and key events, and build a small exploration that adds bounce rate.
Before you start
You need a Google account. Google offers a free GA4 demo account with real, anonymized data from the Google Merchandise Store, its online shop (there is also a property for the Flood-It! game app). Open the "Demo account" page in Google’s Analytics Help and click the link for the Google Merchandise Store property. If you do not have an Analytics account yet, Google creates one for you and adds the demo to it.
Every demo user gets the Viewer role. You can read every report, change dates and comparisons, and build your own explorations, but you cannot change the property or edit the standard reports, so nothing you do can break it.
Two GA4 words first. A session is one visit. A key event is an action the business has marked as important, such as a purchase or a form submission. Google renamed these from "conversions"; in GA4 the word "conversion" now means a key event that is also used to measure and bid on ads.
Steps
- Open analytics.google.com and use the property selector at the top left to pick the Google Merchandise Store property.
- In the left menu choose Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition.
- Set the date range at the top right to Last 28 days, then turn on Compare to the preceding period, so every number shows its change.
- Look at the table. Each row is a channel from GA4’s default channel group: Organic Search, Direct, Paid Search, Referral, Email and so on. Sort by Sessions to see which channel brings the most visits.
- Now sort by Key events to see which channel brings the most valuable actions. The order often changes, which is the point of the exercise.
- Compare Engagement rate across channels. It is the share of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a key event, or had 2 or more page views.
- Bounce rate is not in this report by default, and only Editors can add metrics to a standard report. As a Viewer, build it in an exploration instead: click Explore in the left menu and choose Blank. Next to Dimensions click +, find Session default channel group and import it. Next to Metrics click + and import Sessions, Engagement rate and Bounce rate. Drag the dimension to Rows and the three metrics to Values.
How to read what you see
Say the table shows Organic Search with 42,000 sessions, a 61% engagement rate and 380 key events, and Paid Search with 9,000 sessions, a 55% engagement rate and 210 key events. Organic brings more visitors overall, but paid converts at a higher rate per session: 210 / 9,000 = 2.3%, against 380 / 42,000 = 0.9%.
GA4’s bounce rate is the share of sessions that were not engaged, so it is always 100% minus engagement rate: a 61% engagement rate means a 39% bounce rate, which your exploration will confirm. A blog channel with a high bounce rate is not necessarily bad: a reader who finds the answer in a few seconds and leaves is a bounce too. Judge blog traffic on whether it later returns or signs up, not on bounce rate alone.
Answering your manager
Write two sentences, with numbers: "Organic search sent the most visitors (42,000) and the most key events (380). Paid search converts better per visit (2.3% vs 0.9%), so it is worth testing more budget." That is a better answer than a screenshot of the table.
If campaign traffic shows up as "Unassigned", Google’s tagging guidance points to missing or inconsistent UTM parameters, the tags that tell GA4 which campaign a click came from. Set utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign on every campaign link.
Check your understanding
Which GA4 report shows sessions by channel such as Organic Search and Paid Search?
Show the answer
Traffic acquisition. Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition groups sessions by channel.
Engagement rate is 64%. What is bounce rate in GA4?
Show the answer
36%. In GA4, bounce rate = 100% − engagement rate.
Paid Search: 5,000 sessions and 150 key events. Organic: 20,000 sessions and 300 key events. Which converts better per session?
Show the answer
Paid Search (3%). 150 / 5,000 = 3% and 300 / 20,000 = 1.5%.
Sources
Checked against these official help pages on . Menus change, so if a button has moved, the help page has the current wording.
- Demo account
- [GA4] Traffic acquisition report
- [GA4] Default channel group
- [GA4] Engagement rate and bounce rate
- [GA4] Conversions vs. key events in Google Analytics
- [GA4] Customize metrics in detail reports
- [GA4] Tagging best practices to avoid unassigned, (not set), and direct traffic issues