GA4 for marketers: the seven reports worth opening every week

Google Analytics 4 ships with dozens of standard reports and an exploration tool that can answer almost anything. Most weeks you need very little of it. The useful test for any report is simple: does looking at it change what you do next?

These seven pass that test. They cover the four questions worth asking every week: where did people come from, what did they do, what was it worth, and is anything broken.

Report names and menu locations are as they appear in the standard GA4 interface at the time of writing. Google renames and moves things regularly, so if a label has changed, search for it in the report library.

Set the comparison before you read a number

A number on its own tells you nothing. Before opening any report, set the date range to the last seven full days and turn on comparison with the previous period. If your business is seasonal, add the same week last year.

Then check which actions are marked as key events, which is GA4's name for what used to be called conversions. Keep the list short: a purchase, a submitted lead form, a booked call. If everything is a key event, nothing is.

Reports 1 and 2: where visits came from

1. Traffic acquisition

Found under Acquisition, this report shows sessions, engagement and key events for each channel. Look for any channel that moved by more than its normal week-to-week wobble, then switch the dimension to source and medium to see what is behind it.

Pay attention to growth in Direct or Unassigned. That usually means links are missing campaign tags, not that behavior has really changed.

2. Landing page

Under Engagement, the landing page report lists the pages where sessions begin. Sort by sessions and read across to the key event columns. Two patterns matter. Pages with plenty of visits and few key events are your best candidates for improvement. Pages appearing in the top rows for the first time tell you a piece of content or a campaign is gaining ground.

Reports 3 and 4: what people did

3. Events

Open the Events report and look only at your key events. You are checking two things: that each one is still being recorded, and that the count is in its usual range. A key event that falls to almost zero overnight is a tracking break until proven otherwise. The usual causes are a site release, a changed form or an update to the consent banner.

Do this check first. If tracking is broken, every other report is telling you a story about the bug.

4. Ecommerce purchases

For stores, this report under Monetization shows how often each product was viewed, added to a cart and bought. A product with many views and few adds has a problem on its own page: price, photos, sizing or stock. A product with many adds and few purchases has a problem later on: shipping cost, delivery time or checkout friction.

If you generate leads instead of sales, use the Events report in the same way. Compare how many people start a form with how many submit it.

Reports 5 and 6: search demand and the path to a conversion

5. Search Console queries

Once Search Console is linked to the property and its reports are published in the library, you can see the search terms that bring people to the site next to what they do when they arrive. Look for queries with many impressions where you rank just below the top results. Those pages are the closest to earning more traffic. Also note queries where impressions held steady and clicks fell. Something else on the results page is now answering the question.

6. Attribution paths

In the Advertising section, this report shows the sequence of channels people touched before a key event. Open it before you cut a channel that looks weak. A channel that rarely gets the last click may still start a large share of the journeys that end in a sale.

Treat it as direction, not accounting. It can only show the touchpoints it was able to observe, and consent choices and device switching hide some of them.

Report 7: is anything broken?

7. Tech details

Change the dimension to device category, then to browser, and compare the key event rate across the rows. Audiences do differ by device, but they do not change overnight. A sudden gap in one browser or on one screen size is almost always a bug: a button hidden behind a banner, a script that failed to load, a form that will not submit.

A fifteen-minute Monday routine

1. Events: is tracking intact?
2. Traffic acquisition: which channels moved?
3. Landing page: where did the change land, and did those pages do their job?
4. One of reports four to six, depending on the question the first three raised.
5. Tech details: once a month, and after every site release.

Finish by writing three sentences: what changed, why you think it changed, and what you will do about it. If the honest answer to the last one is “nothing”, that is a valid result. The point of the routine is to notice the weeks when it is not.

If you have edit access, group these seven into one collection in the report library. Everything else in GA4 can wait until you have a specific question for it.