How to Create a Custom Report In GA4

Hi, it's Natalie from Marcel Digital. So, Google Analytics 4 is now the official Google Analytics, and it has been for about two months now. With the takeover of Universal Analytics, GA4 is offering a ton of cool new features. One of my favorites is the custom reporting and navigation options that Google now offers. So, you can take your reporting beyond just the out-of-the-box reports and beyond just simple filters, and really hone in on what is important to you and your business.

Today, I'll be walking through how to create these custom reports as well as how to create custom navigation. First things first, you want to make sure that you find the correct GA4 property and that you have at least an editor role. Then, you'll navigate over to the reports, and once you're there, go down to the bottom of the screen where you'll see "Library." Click on that, and then this will bring you to the reports library. This is where you can organize all of the custom reports that you're creating and create more.

We'll start out by creating a new report, and we will do creating a detailed report. In here, we'll select "Traffic Acquisition," though there are many other options that you can choose from. Once you're on this screen, you can look over at the custom report nav bar where you can select the different dimensions and metrics you want. In this case, we don't have an e-commerce client, so we'll remove total revenue and we don't care about events per session, so we'll take that out too. Once you click apply, then you'll see that any of the metrics that you chose to get rid of are gone.

In addition, you can also add metrics or dimensions, it's totally up to you. Then we'll add a report filter. In this case, we'll choose "Session Default Channel Group" with a match type of "Exactly Matches," and then we'll select "Organic Search." Once we've done that, we'll click apply, and then you'll see that this will filter down to just organic search.

After that, we will go up to "Save" and add a report name. For this, we'll do "Organic Search Traffic Acquisition." Once we've done that, we'll click save, and then you'll see that this report has been saved in your library.

Then we'll click the back button and go up to create a new collection. Here you'll see that there are a bunch of different templates that you can choose from, but in this case, we'll just select blank. This allows us to create a totally new, totally custom collection to suit our needs.

First, we'll select "Untitled Collection" and rename it "SEO." Then we'll create a new topic and say "SEO Reports." After that, we'll click apply, and then that'll open up an overview report and detail report option.

So, for our detail reports, we'll select that "Organic Search Traffic Acquisition," and for our overview reports, we'll just do "Acquisition Overview." Once we've done that, we'll click save, and you can create additional topics as desired. Each of your topics can have up to 10 reports; however, you can only select one overview report for each topic. This is because the overview report functions like a dashboard.

Once you've added all of the topics and reports, we will go back, and then you'll see that under the collections, our SEO collection has now become available. It's not done yet though. Now we have to add this collection to our reporting navigation.

So, we'll click those three little dots in the corner and then click publish. Now you can see that the SEO reports have shown up on your reporting navigation. If you click into it, you can see the traffic acquisition overview, and then organic search traffic acquisition. This is the custom-filtered report that we've created, and once you click into it, you'll see that it's just filtered to organic search.

Collections are displayed in alphabetical order, and you cannot change the order in which they're displayed. Well, there you have it. You've created your first custom report and custom navigation in GA4. If you like this video, please don't hesitate to give it a thumbs up, and if you have any questions, leave comments down below. Thanks for watching.