Ah, reports! They tell you where your visitors are coming from, what they're doing, and sometimes, what they had for breakfast. Okay, maybe not the last part, but you get the idea.
In today's episode, we're going to focus on one particular aspect: analyzing the domains (referrals) from which users visit your website. It's like peering into the secret passages that bring traffic to your virtual doorstep. But remember dear Grandpa, this is just an example of what GA4 can do.
Now, you might be wondering, why should we care about these nitty-gritty details? Well, knowing the best traffic sources allows you to focus your efforts and resources where it truly matters. You can curate your content, tailor your marketing strategies, and optimize your website to appeal to the audience that loves you most.
So let’s find out what sources are the best ones:
First things first. We need to think about what we want to know – in our case, we want to discover the referral domains and how many users visit our page from them.
Let’s start with the Library where we create our "new" reports and collection for them.
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Creating new report
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Let's explain the differences between an overview report and a detail report.
Overview report
An overview report is like a Dashboard. It gathers many different "blocks" which display data. It can be mixed with different dimensions and metrics. But today we will focus on the detail report and skip the overview report for another episode of our GA4 For Your Grandpa series.
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Detail report
This is our goal for today. The detail report is focused on one Dimension – so exactly like our case where we focus on referral source domains.
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Okay, so now we know the difference between overview and detail report, so let’s choose Create detail report.
Google Analytics 4 has many templates you can use with just one click, but this time we will be creating a custom report for our project that is unavailable in default GA4. Let’s choose a Blank report.
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Once you click it, a new report is created:
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It’s time to customize it to our needs.
First – add Dimension and Metrics:
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And let’s choose the Session source:
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And Apply:
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We do the same with Metrics. Let's add them to our new custom report:
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Let’s add these three Metrics: Total users, New users, and Sessions.
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Nowyoushould see the charts and data in the table. If you have traffic on your site, then you can already see this data in this form. And if you don't– do not worry, just act! Everyone starts somewhere. ;)
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The last thing in our custom report we need to do is to create a report filter for our case:
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We're creating a filter because in our report so far we can see data from any source - and as you remember, we want to display only referral traffic. Therefore, to display only this data we need to create a filter, which we set to display information only from the source referral:
We choose the Session default channel group, by which we will filter our data:
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And apply the changes.
Now we see what we want to see – referral domains:
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The last thing we need to do is to set the name of our new custom report in GA4 and add it to the collection we create and publish the collection. So let’s go – we are almost there!
Save the report:
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Set the name to Referral Traffic:
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Now let’s create our new Collection for the reports we are going to create:
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Choose blank:
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Now let’s set the name for the Collection (Digi2 Reports). Then set the Topic name (Traffic Source). Then search for our report by typing its name (referral traffic).
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Once you find your new custom report - just drag it into your Collection Topic.
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Now it's time to save our new collection:
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Save as a new collection and give it a name:
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Click save and we are almost there (for real this time ;)).
Now, when you save the Collection, you need to go back to the Library in GA4.
You should see the new collection in your GA4 Library:
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Click the three dots and then Publish the collection:
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Our new custom report within the collection has been published:
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Yay! :)
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Voila. It's done. We just created our first custom report for our project. It wasn’t that hard, huh? ;)
