--- title: "GA4 Upgrade Notes Part 3 - Understanding and Customizing Reports" description: "This is the third installment of our GA4 upgrade notes, offering a deep dive into traffic sources, e-commerce conversion rates, ad performance metrics (ROAS, CPA), and how to build custom reports to analyze customer behavior." canonical_url: "https://blog.markkulab.net/en/post/upgrade-to-ga4-parts-3" author: "Mark Ku" author_url: "https://blog.markkulab.net/en/author/mark-ku" site: "Mark Ku's Tech Notes" date_published: "2025-01-07 01:01:02 +0800" category: "Google Analytics" tags: ["ga4", "google analytics", "reports", "ecommerce", "roas", "conversion"] language: "en" license: "CC BY 4.0" license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" attribution: "when reusing or quoting, credit the author and link back to the original" --- # GA4 Upgrade Notes Part 3 - Understanding and Customizing Reports ## The Value of Data - **Data is useless; insights are what matter**: Data itself has no value. The key is to identify problems from it and transform those findings into strategies that improve performance or conversion rates. - **Short-term data is only a reference; focus on long-term trends**: A single data point often fails to reveal the full picture. Only long-term trends can demonstrate true value. ## GA4 Reports Overview GA4 provides reports in the following four core areas: 1. **Acquisition**: Understand how users arrive at your website. 2. **Engagement**: Analyze user behavior and interactions on the site. 3. **Monetization**: Track website revenue (requires an engineer to implement advanced e-commerce code). 4. **Retention**: Analyze the ratio of new to returning customers. ## Report Interpretation Guide ### Understanding Top-Selling Products - Daily sales performance of top-selling products. - A list of high-volume, low-profit products. - Compare sales rates and view rates to identify issues. ### Traffic Source Analysis - Effectiveness of ad-driven traffic. - Traffic contribution from external sites like social media and forums. - Trends in organic traffic. - Use source data to analyze visitor performance from different countries and regions, identifying high-potential markets for focused promotion. ### E-commerce Reports #### **E-commerce Conversion - Abandonment** - **Cart abandonment**: The percentage of users who add items to their cart but do not complete the purchase. - **Checkout abandonment**: The percentage of users who start the checkout process but do not complete the purchase. #### **Returning Customer Analysis** - High-value vs. low-value returning customers - New customers who made only one purchase #### **High-Value Actions** - Users who clicked on internal promotions but did not purchase. - Users who searched for products but did not purchase. - Users who watched videos but did not purchase. P.S. If you find that the monetization amount in GA4 is 0, an engineer needs to implement e-commerce events to send order information to GTM, which then forwards the data to GA. ### Conversion Rate Conversion rate is a key performance indicator (KPI) for e-commerce websites, used to measure the proportion of visitors who complete a target action. The most common is the order conversion rate. Formula: Conversion Rate = Number of Conversions / Total Number of Visits **Example:** - Number of Orders: 3834 - Sessions (Number of Visits): 347311 ``` 3834 / 347311 = 0.011 ``` Besides order conversion rate, you can also monitor the following metrics: - Purchase conversion rate - Registration conversion rate - Click conversion rate - Page conversion rate - Add-to-cart conversion rate ## Custom Events and Goal Setting GA4 offers powerful customization features, allowing users to set goals for specific actions and conversions, including: - **Tracking user behavior**: Such as button clicks, video views, form submissions, etc. - **Funnel conversion analysis**: Custom events can help build conversion funnels to analyze user drop-off at each stage. - **Measuring content interaction**: Track article read completion, scroll depth, etc., to optimize content strategy. - **Monitoring web page traffic**: Such as visits to promotion pages and watched product pages. - **Automated goal monitoring**: Set custom events as goals to enable automated reporting for key conversion actions. - **Multi-platform data integration**: Unify tracking for similar events on both apps and websites to achieve cross-platform analysis. ### Setting Goals for Specific URLs - **Goal**: Understand the performance of a specific URL or page. - Set up a custom event to track the number of visits to a specific page. **Example:** ![Goal setting example](https://blog.markkulab.net/content/markku/posts/upgrade-to-ga4-parts-3/images/conversion-report.png) ## Ad Performance Metrics ### Interpreting Key Metrics - **CPC (Cost Per Click)**: The cost for each click, used to measure the cost of driving traffic. - **CPA (Cost Per Action)**: The cost for each action, focusing on conversion costs. - **CTR (Click Through Rate)**: The click-through rate, reflecting the attractiveness of an ad. - **ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)**: The return on ad spend. ROAS is a very important metric. This number represents how many dollars you earn for every dollar invested in advertising. **Example**: - Ad Spend: $10,000 - Ad Revenue: $50,000 ``` 50,000 / 10,000 = 5 ``` ## Finally We have designed a series of custom reports for different business needs to help you gain deeper insights into customer behavior and website performance: 1. **Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate Analysis** Explore cart abandonment scenarios and their causes to find optimization opportunities. 2. **Scroll Depth Tracking** Understand the level of user interaction on the site to evaluate content appeal. 3. **High Bounce Rate Page Ranking** Identify the pages users most frequently exit from and analyze areas for improvement. 4. **Customer Search Behavior Report** Track customer search queries on the site to identify popular keywords. 5. **Order Analysis by Time of Day** Identify peak sales periods to inform marketing strategies. 6. **Order Conversion Rate Tracking** Evaluate conversion efficiency to optimize the sales process. 7. **Login Method Preference Analysis** Understand customers' preferred login methods (e.g., Normal, Discord, Google). 8. **Popular Game Preference Report** Analyze which games customers are most interested in to guide game recommendations. ## Additional Notes - **(not set)**: When "Session source / medium" shows as "(not set)," it means GA4 could not determine the user's source and medium, possibly due to direct URL entry or other reasons. - If the number of users within a date range is too low, it may prevent reports or explorations from displaying data. P.S. [Google Signals will be removed from reporting identity on February 12, 2024.](https://www.turingdigital.com.tw/blog/ga4-google-signal-retire) --- ## About this article and its author Originally published on [Mark Ku's Tech Notes](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/post/upgrade-to-ga4-parts-3) License: [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) — when reusing or quoting, credit the author and link back to the original ### About the author **[Mark Ku](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/author/mark-ku)** — Software Solution Provider - 10+ years senior software engineer, now an AI Builder - Focused on large-platform architecture — North-American e-commerce, AI SaaS subscription billing - Combining AI Agents and automation to build evolvable product foundations ### Free tools built by the author All of these are free to use: - [Free PDF Sign Tool](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/pdf-sign): Online PDF sign tool — draw, type, or upload a signature, then drag, resize, and download. 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No sign-up, nothing uploaded to a server, and mermaid.live share links work as-is. - [React Intl Phone Number](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/react-intl-phone-number): react-intl-phone-number is an open-source React component: framework-agnostic and antd-free, with E.164 in/out, a searchable flag / country-code dropdown, configurable validation levels (strict / mobile-strict / loose), themeable CSS, and i18n — phone logic powered by google-libphonenumber. Lightweight and fully typed. Free and open source (MIT). - [Uptime Kuma Cluster](https://blog.markkulab.net/en/tools/uptime-kuma-cluster): Turn single-node Uptime Kuma into a highly available cluster: OpenResty + Lua smart load balancing, shared MariaDB state, health checks and automatic failover, plus cluster-management REST APIs. One Docker Compose command to start. 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