Deep Dive Into GA4 Reports & Explorations

The leap to GA4 draws ever nearer, and along with it comes the need to quickly get marketing departments on board with a host of new tools and reporting features.

GA4 caused some initial confusion with its rollout of both “Reports” and another feature they’re calling “Explorations,” with each serving a similar-yet-different function in this new digital ecosystem. Here’s everything you need to master GA4 reporting and ensure you’re using this powerful new tool to its fullest.

GA4 Reports: An Overview

The goal of Google’s new reporting framework is to provide marketers with detailed insights into their respective businesses. GA4’s big selling point is its advanced ability to attribute data to individual users across platforms and devices without infringing on any data privacy policies. Reports are built by connecting this user data to site activity, identifying patterns in engagement, conversion rates, and several other key trends to develop a more flexible marketing action plan.

In addition to standard reporting parameters like identifying the origins of incoming traffic and which campaigns are driving the most activity, GA4 includes a “Realtime Report.” This report consists of data up to the latest 30 minutes — a useful feature for catching any potential snags with a new campaign or product launch. Advertisers can also create custom filters to easily view subsets of user data (and even compare datasets side-by-side). 

Creating Successful GA4 Reports

GA4 comes preloaded with about 20 standard reports built for your convenience, but marketers can still tailor reporting parameters to their liking. Creating a new report is fairly user-friendly; options to edit an existing report, make a copy, or build an entirely new one can all be found under “Reports” followed by “Library.”

A good report accurately measures activity with a goal-specific KPI. For digital marketing teams, this often takes the form of comparing all traffic with organic-only traffic to gauge the impact of paid promotions or page vs. site conversion rates to adjust which pages are lagging behind in prompting user actions.

Explorations Explained

If you want to expand your view of site data and other insights, the “Explore” tab on the left-hand side of GA4’s base dashboard unlocks more granular reporting capabilities. 

According to Google, Explorations is a “collection of advanced techniques that go beyond standard reports to help you uncover deeper insights about your customers’ behavior.” In practice, Explorations gives marketers a chance to tinker with every filter and data subset they can get their hands on at the user level. That means increased functionality, additional dimensions and segmentation, and ultimately more pointed insights to spur further action.

This tab is also the portal to use visualization tools like pathway and funnel explorations, which break the average customer’s journey with your brand into easily viewable (and of course, trackable) steps.

How detailed can explorations be?

There are some technical limits to the number of filters, segments, and individual explorations you can create within GA4. Per Google, advertisers can create up to:

-200 individual explorations per user per property
-500 shared explorations per property
-10 segments per exploration
-10 filters per tab

Quickly Learn Your Way Around Explorations

Marketers familiar with Google’s suite of tools (Drive, Sheets, Docs, and so forth) will feel right at home using Explorations. Options to create a new form or use a pre-configured template (such as free-form, funnel, or segment overlap explorations) are spread across the top of the page, with previous projects organized below.

After opening a new exploration, a pair of columns on the left (labeled Variables and Tab Settings) contain optional filters and visualizations to produce your desired report. Common demographic targeting levers like age, gender, and interest — as well as all attribution settings — are nested within the Variables column under “Dimensions.”

Key Data Differences Between Reports and Explorations

Standard reports are designed for top-level data analysis, with some dimensions and metrics only available through this tab and not supported within Explorations. While reports can quickly identify rises and fall in key events without digging into segmented data, Explorations will likely draw more attention since it houses the most advanced filters, user-level data, and broader functionality.

Though the transition to GA4 may include an unwanted learning curve for advertisers used to Universal Analytics’ more familiar dashboards and tools, correctly utilizing both reports and explorations within GA4 will undoubtedly serve every brand’s long-term marketing efforts.

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