How to make Google Analytics better (and more like Universal Analytics)

Fewer fourth editions of things have been so poorly received as GA4. Toy Story 4 had its flaws but stands up to scrutiny. Many people consider Adele’s fourth album, 30, to be her best. The fourth World Cup in 1950 wasn’t a roaring success, with hosts Brazil losing in the final to Uruguay, but it feels like people have moved on from that.



But fear not! There are several ways in which you can make GA4 “better” – and I’ve outlined those here, with particular focus on things that can be done in the interface, with only a basic level of knowledge required.

Making GA4s default reports better

A lot of the challenges with GA4 are users not being able to find what they need. And there are a couple of simple ways in which this can be achieved. 

Problem 1: My GA4 report is missing the Universal Analytics metrics that I want

Google messed up here. They released GA4 in such a staggered approach that certain reports were released before metrics that you’d want to use in them were available. Case in point is the Landing Page report. Rightly or wrongly, people want to generally understand which pages are causing users to leave the site straight away (or “bounce”). But bounce rate is not a default report here. The solution: edit an existing report and change the metric (or dimension) that you want.

To do this, you will need to be an admin, but you can navigate to the report, and in the top ribbon just below the date range, you will see a pencil, or edit, icon:

Clicking “edit” takes you into a view where you can simply go through and amend as you see fit. In this example, all we’re going to do is click “Metrics” in the right-hand menu, “add metric” at the bottom of the list, search “bounce rate”, select it, and use the six dots next to “bounce rate” to move it where we want it to be. 

You can also get rid of unnecessary metrics here. But once you’re done, hit Apply in the bottom right then “Save”, and select “changes to current report”, and confirm by hitting “save”.       

This is now the default Landing Page report!

Problem 2: I have to do the same thing every time I log in to GA4, like filtering for my marketing channel

This is another use case for the same technique. In this instance, let’s imagine I run PPC campaigns and am mainly interested in understanding the performance of PPC landing pages.

Here I will follow the same steps as before, to Edit the existing report and this time, instead of changing the metrics or dimensions, I’ll just add a report filter – also in the right-hand menu. 

Once that is done, again, hit “apply” and then “Save” – but this time, I want to save it as a new report so I would select “save as a new report”. You’ll be prompted to give it a name e.g. PPC Landing Pages and click save. At this stage, this report only exists in what’s known as the Library. You should see this at the bottom of the regular left-hand menu:

You then have two options. One is leave it there, and just go into the Library every time you want to use that report, rather than making the same adjustments each time. The second is to “push” that report into the main navigation. To do this, when you’re in the Library, you’ll see “Collections”:

This is where all reports sit. You’ll notice the Collections are the categories or folders that reports sit in on the left-hand side. Choose the Collection where you want the new report to go, click the three dots in the top left of that box and hit “edit”. Then, find the report you just created in the right hand list, and move it across to the desired place on the left hand side.

Then hit “Save”, “save changes to current collection” and bam! It’s in the main navigation:

You can do this for any common reports you use but bear in mind this change is at the property level not the user-level. i.e. everyone who has access to that property will see those changes. 

Problem 3: I’d do the above but I don’t like the grouping of my GA4 channels!

Well you can create your own default channel grouping. It’s rules-based, fairly logical and retrospective – so you can’t mess things up!

To do this, I’d advocate opening two tabs:

1. The standard traffic report, usually called “Traffic Acquisition”. This allows you to see the current utm tagging being used.
2. The one that controls Channel Groups. Go to Admin (bottom left) then Data Display then Channel Groups

Once you’re in the Channel Groups view you’ll see the default, uneditable channel group. This is based on Google’s default rules. But you can create two of your own channel groups. To do this:

1. Click “create new channel group”
2. Give it a name – usually “<Brand> Channel Group”
3. Then you’re into your rules – you can, modify or remove rules

For example, one curious change Google has made in GA4 is to split PPC into several buckets – Paid Search, Paid Shopping, Paid Video, Paid Other and Cross Network (this is typically Performance Max and Demand Gen).

If you wanted to reduce this into one bucket for example, you could simply remove all of the buckets except one, by clicking the three dots then “remove channel”.

You could then make the remaining bucket catch all the PPC traffic by editing the rule. Let’s say we’ve kept the Paid Search bucket – by clicking into this we see the default rule:

Clicking the bin icon in the image above will delete that rule. We can then create a new one to choose “medium” is “cpc”:

If that was the only change we wanted to make, we would hit “Save channel” in the top right, then “Save Group” in the top right.

This dimension now becomes available for you to use across any report. At this point, you can go back to your other tab to check that it’s saved and looks as you want it to – should be almost immediate!

That’s part one of some simple steps you can take to make your view of the GA4 world a bit of a better place to be. Stay tuned for part 2!