GA4 without the headache: the only five reports you need

Google Analytics 4 gives you a mountain of data, and you'll never need most of it. Five reports answer the questions that actually drive decisions for a small or medium business: where visitors come from, where they land, whether they enquire, what they read and which devices they use.

Those reports are only as good as the set-up behind them, though, so check four settings first.

Before the reports: four settings to check once

These take half an hour, and they make every report afterwards worth trusting.

• Your enquiries, bookings or sales are marked as key events. GA4 calls your most important actions key events. To mark one, go to Admin, then Data display, then Events, and click the star next to it. If your enquiry form does not send an event at all, that is the first thing to fix, and it may need your developer or someone who knows Google Tag Manager.
  What good looks like

  In Admin, under Data display and Events, your enquiry, booking or purchase event has its star switched on, and a test enquiry you sent shows up as a key event within a day.

  Takes twenty minutes if the event already exists; longer if the form sends nothing yet. Covered in GA4 tells you nothing useful? Set up key events, step by step.

• Data retention is set to 14 months. Standard properties can keep user-level data for 2 months or 14 months. The setting affects explorations and funnel reports rather than the standard reports, but 14 months lets you compare with the same period last year when you dig deeper.
  What good looks like

  In Admin, under Data collection and modification, Data retention shows 14 months for event data.

  Takes two minutes. Covered in full above.

• Your own visits are filtered out. If you and your staff visit the site often, your own clicks can distort a small site's figures. Google explains how to filter out internal traffic by IP address; the filter can start in a testing state so you can check it before it applies.
  What good looks like

  An internal traffic filter for your office or home IP address is set up and active, after you checked it in its testing state first.

  Takes twenty minutes. Covered in full above.

• Search Console is linked. Linking Search Console adds two reports, Google Organic Search Queries and Google Organic Search Traffic, so you can see which searches bring people and how those visitors behave.
  What good looks like

  In Admin, under Product links, Search Console shows as linked, and the Google Organic Search Queries report shows data.

  Takes ten minutes, with admin access to both. Covered in Why is my website not showing up on Google or Bing? A step-by-step diagnosis.

Then submit a test enquiry and watch it arrive in the Realtime report. If it doesn't appear as a key event, stop and fix that before you read anything else.

If enquiries aren't tracked at all

This is common, and it's the most important thing on this page to fix. Until an enquiry is recorded as a key event, none of the other four reports can tell you which visitors were worth having. There are three usual ways to set one up, and our step-by-step guide to setting up key events walks through each of them with Google's current menu names. Whichever you choose, test it with a real enquiry before you rely on it.

1. Traffic acquisition: where visitors come from

Where to find it: Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition.

What it shows: your visits grouped by channel, such as Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, Organic Social and Email.

What to look at: use the drop-down on the key events column to choose your enquiry event on its own, so you can see which channels bring enquiries and not just visits. A channel with lots of sessions and no key events is sending you the wrong people, or sending the right people to the wrong page.

What to do with it: this is the place to start when splitting a budget between channels. Move effort towards the channels that bring enquiries at the lowest cost, which means knowing what marketing costs in the UK channel by channel, and question the ones that bring only visits.

Watch out for: a lot of traffic labelled Unassigned or Direct, which can hide where people really came from. Adding a short label to the end of your email and social links cuts that down, and Google's free Campaign URL Builder does it for you.

2. Landing page: where visitors arrive

Where to find it: Reports, then Engagement, then Landing page.

What it shows: the first page people see on each visit. These are your front doors, and they often aren't your homepage.

What to look at: sort by sessions, then look at the key events for each page. An important landing page with many visits and few enquiries is where to focus. So is a page you never meant as a front door that's receiving a lot of visitors, which is often an old blog post or a service page found through search.

What to do with it: make sure your busiest landing pages say clearly what you do and give an obvious next step. The homepage checklist works for any landing page, and pages that receive ad traffic should follow the structure of a landing page that converts.

3. Key events: whether they enquire or buy

Where to find it: Reports, then Engagement, then Events, plus the key event figures in the reports above once your key events are set up.

What it shows: how often your important actions happen and, alongside the reports above, where they come from.

What to look at: the trend over months, and the count of key events against your own records. If GA4 says twelve enquiries last month and your inbox says twenty, something isn't being counted, or some visitors declined analytics cookies. If GA4 says forty and your inbox says twenty, something is being counted twice, or the wrong action is marked as key.

What to do with it: use it as your headline number. Everything else in GA4 is supporting evidence for why this number moved.

4. Pages and screens: what they read

Where to find it: Reports, then Engagement, then Pages and screens.

What it shows: every page people viewed, not just the first. Unlike the landing page report, it includes the pages seen later in a visit.

What to look at: your most viewed pages, and how long people spend on them. The pages many people visit on the way to enquiring are the ones to keep sharp, and they're often your pricing, services and contact pages. Pages with many views and very little engagement may be answering the wrong question.

What to do with it: check that your most viewed pages link clearly to the next step, and that what people obviously want, such as prices or examples, is easy to find rather than buried.

5. Tech details: which devices they use

Where to find it: Reports, then Tech, then Tech details, then change the table to show Device category.

What it shows: how many visits come from phones, computers and tablets, and how each one converts.

What to look at: the share of visits from phones, and whether phone visitors enquire at a similar rate to computer visitors. A big gap often points to a poor experience on a phone: a slow page, a form that's fiddly on a small screen, or a button that sits below the fold.

What to do with it: test your key pages and your enquiry form on your own phone, as a stranger would. It's the quickest usability test there is.

What the engagement numbers mean

GA4 reports engagement rather than the old "bounce rate" most people remember, so it helps to know what it's counting. Google defines an engaged session as one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event, or has two or more page or screen views. The engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were engaged.

That makes it a rough measure of whether people found what they came for, not a measure of success in itself. A contact page can have a low engagement rate because people find the phone number in five seconds and call. A blog post can have a high one because people read it and then leave without doing anything. Use engagement to spot pages that are clearly failing, and key events to judge what's working.

Put the five on one page

You don't have to click through five reports every month. There are two ways to put them in one place:

• Inside GA4, anyone with the Editor or Administrator role can customise the reports collection in the left-hand menu, adding, removing and reordering reports so that the five you use sit together.
• In Looker Studio, Google's free reporting tool, you can build a one-page dashboard from your GA4 data, with the headline numbers at the top and the five tables underneath. It takes an hour or two to set up, and it can be emailed to you each month.

Either is fine. What matters is that the numbers you need are quick to reach, so that the monthly check actually happens.

The fifteen-minute monthly routine

Make this a monthly habit. Fifteen minutes looking at the right numbers beats hours lost in reports you don't need.

Write down one thing to do as a result, however small. A report that doesn't lead to an action is just reading. Google Analytics shows what people did once they reached your site. If too few are arriving from search in the first place, finding out why your site isn't showing up is a different job.

When GA4 and reality disagree

GA4 will rarely match your ad platforms or your inbox exactly. Each tool counts at different moments and in different ways, and visitors who decline analytics cookies may not be counted the same way. That's normal. The rules on when analytics needs consent changed in February 2026, so it's also worth checking whether you need a cookie banner for analytics under the new rules. What matters is that the trends agree, and that the gap between them stays stable. If it suddenly widens, something has changed: a website update that removed the tag, a form that stopped sending its event, or a consent banner that started behaving differently.

Your own records, the enquiries in your inbox and the sales in your accounts, are always the final check. GA4 is there to explain them, not to replace them. Tracking is also the first thing to look at if you're wondering whether your agency is doing a good job.

If you'd like the set-up checked properly, our GA4 and tracking fix does exactly that, for a fixed £2,500, in about two weeks.