Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
The Google Analytics 4 dashboard
The Google Analytics 4 dashboard is a collection of data, charts, widgets, and tiles. It gives you an overview of the most important metrics and reports for your website and mobile app.
The main benefit of dashboards is that you can share them with key stakeholders to give them a top-line, ‘at a glance’ view of visitor and conversion information.
Using GA4 reports to gain insights
There are two main reporting categories – officially known as report collections – found in the “Reports” section in Google Analytics 4:
- Lifecycle report categories
- User report categories
The reports within each of these two report categories or collections enable you to understand website user interactions and traffic sources.
Lifecycle reports
The four types of Lifecycle reports are:
- Acquisition: These reports give an overview of, and details about, the channels that bring users and traffic to your website. It tells you where you acquired the users from. Specific reports exist for Google products such as Google Ads and Organic Search Traffic.
- Retention: These reports give you data on repeat visits by various cohorts as defined by GA4. From this, you can ascertain how many customers you are retaining.
- Engagement: These reports give an overview of, and details about, the website interactions, known as events. These events include downloading content, watching a video, or visiting certain pages. As well as tracking the pages that people are engaging with on your site, you can track your events as conversions.
- Monetization: These reports give you an overview of ecommerce revenue generated on your website or through your mobile app. It then details ecommerce purchases and in-app purchases. In addition, if you’re serving ads on your website, you can track how much revenue you are generating from these ads. All this information provides insights on how you’re monetizing your website and/or app(s).
User reports
The second category of GA4 reports is the User reports. There are two main types of User reports to be aware of:
- Demographics: These reports give you an overview of, and details about, the demographic makeup of your website users. Such demographics include their age and gender, but most importantly where they are located.
- Tech: These reports give you an overview of users by platform – in other words, website and mobile app users. GA4 aims to unify the reporting for traditional website and mobile app engagement, so organizations that use both can evaluate the performance of their platforms side by side in one analytics interface. The tech reports also give details on the browser used to access your website, the device types used (such as mobile, desktop, tablet, and so on), as well as the operating system on users’ devices.
Note: If your organization doesn’t have a mobile app, however, GA4 will just track website user interactions. Therefore, you shouldn’t feel that you need a mobile app to get the most out of GA4.
Back to TopCathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
Clark Boyd
Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.
Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing.
Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.
