An Overview of Report Types in GA4

To help you learn the basics of using GA4, Optimus marketing agency has put together the common report types found in this analytics tool in the article below.

Reports, Explore and Advertising

Reports, Explore and Advertising are the sections containing most of GA4's important reports. However, GA4's default setup does not show all the specialized reports. You need to create new reports and adjust them to suit your needs.

Next, I will go through each section to explain what each report type does

Reports

Although it is split into many smaller categories, GA4's report structure consists of just 3 main groups:

• Collection: a category of reports

• Overview report: a summary report

• Detail report: a detailed report

Each has a different role in making analysis more convenient

• Collection: contains a set of smaller reports for a specific type of analysis. For example, GA4 has these default collections:

  • Engagement: reports on user engagement on the website, which may include smaller reports such as Page path and screen class, Landing Page and Video Engagement

  • Acquisition: reports on traffic flows, including Default channel, Source / medium, Campaign and Content

• Overview report: summary reports, usually accompanied by charts and showing only a few metrics. They give viewers an overview and a quick assessment of website or app performance, as in the example below. These reports usually have "overview" in their names.

• Detail report: more detailed reports, presented as tables with dimensions and multiple metrics. Detail reports still include two chart reports at the top. However, customization of these two reports is quite limited. See how to add Google Ads reports to GA4

The relationship between collections, overview reports and detail reports can be understood as follows:

A collection usually contains one or more overview reports and detail reports. Overview reports are typically used to provide an overview of the data for the detail reports below them. Detail reports provide more detailed information and add more context to the overview.

In this article, we explored the basic structure of the Reports section in GA4. This structure gives us a clearer view of how GA4 reports are arranged and organized. It provides a foundation for customizing reports to suit our own needs in the future. Stay tuned for more from Optimus. You can also explore the digital marketing services Optimus currently offers right on the website.