Sample Google Data Studio Dashboard for GA4

Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is here. The tool has three reporting systems embedded in it with different levels of maturity.

This post will introduce you to the data available in Google Data Studio using the standard Google Analytics connector. I have built out a sample report of just 5 pages here so you can download it and play with it too.

The first page is just about User Acquisition. This tool is built around users as opposed to just sessions so it makes sense to see this view first.

The first column on dimensions has a drill-down that includes user source, medium and campaign. This will allow the user to go deeper in the data and see all the way to the first campaign that a user comes in through.

Similarly, we can look at our customer data in GA4 through the well-trodden prism of the session. The next page reproduces the data from the first page but from a session perspective.

I have left the columns without aliases so you can easily find them in the data set.

As we keep being told, GA4 is an event-driven tool. So we would be creating lots of events and hence the next page focuses on the data at the level of each event.

There are two types of events. One type is the conversion events like add_to_cart and checkout. There are also other events that are not to do with conversions but just behavior or the journey of the user, e.g. first_visit, or session_start.

The next page is just taking a look from a page perspective. We are disadvantaged in that we cannot use a key dimension called landing page very clearly with this dataset. However, we can look at each page and some engagement metrics associated with it. We still do not have anything like time on page yet so we don’t see much meaningful data on this page.

Hopefully, the landing page dimension and time metrics will get added in very soon.

The next page, is going to be very important for ecommerce companies because here I have put in a lot of the critical ecommerce metrics and events that are available. I started building scorecards and quickly got to 12 before I realized that no one could look at so much and make sense of it in one go. So, I have created two funnel stacks, one with numbers and the other with percentages. Right below that are the actual revenues as you can see below.

The table below shows revenue and the user flow at the bottom of the funnel by each item that is viewed. I think this will provide a very good picture of how the inventory is moving.

I do hope that you are able to use the dashboard and improve upon it for your purposes. Please let me know if there is any way that I can help. Here is the link once again.

UPDATE: For those who have been impacted by the new quota system introduced in Looker Data Studio, I have another dashboard for you built entirely from the BigQuery GA4 data stream connector. You can find it here.