Customise the Reports in Your Property

Objective

To learn how to customise standard reports or build new ones in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) that highlight metrics and dimensions most relevant to your business goals.

Overview

Google Analytics provides many powerful built-in reports. However, your business may require custom views tailored to specific questions or KPIs. With GA4, you can customise existing reports or create new reports from scratch, helping you:

• Focus on relevant metrics
• Save time during analysis
• Align reporting views with evolving business goals

Each GA4 property supports up to 150 custom reports.

Step 1: Understand Customisation Options

What You Can Customise in a Report:

• Primary dimension (e.g., Session source/medium instead of default channel group)
• Displayed metrics (e.g., replace Events with Conversions)
• Chart types (Line, Bar, or Scatter)
• Report filters (e.g., limit report to web traffic only)
• Summary cards
• Link/unlink reports from collections

Step 2: Customise an Existing Report

Let’s walk through editing the Traffic acquisition report.

1. Navigate to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition
2. Click the pencil icon (✏️) in the top right corner

1. Under Dimensions, click into the tile to view all available options. You can either add another dimension or set the available dimensions as default or remove them entirely.
2. For example, locate Session source/medium, click the three dots, and choose Set as default
3. Click Apply

Optional: Hide a Chart Type

1. Scroll to the chart section
2. To hide a chart, click the eye icon next to it (e.g., hide Bar Chart and keep Line Chart)

Save Your Customisation

When saving the report:

• Choose Save as a new report to avoid overwriting the original
• Give it a clear name, e.g. Session Source / Medium Report

Step 3: Create a Custom Report from Scratch

Sometimes, you may want to build a new report entirely. For example, one that includes custom dimensions like member level.

Steps:

1. Navigate to Reports → Library
2. Scroll down and click Create new report → Create detail report

1. Choose Blank to start from scratch
2. Select your dimensions (e.g., member_level)
3. Select your metrics:
   • Sessions
   • Total users
   • Purchases
   • Total revenue
4. Click Save and name your report (e.g., Member Info)

Step 4: Use Filters to Refine Your Reports

Custom filters allow you to target specific subsets of your data. Example:

Scenario: Your web team has rolled out a new user experience and you want to measure its impact.

1. Edit your custom Traffic acquisition report
2. Add a filter where Platform exactly matches web
3. Keep only the Line chart to visualise engagement changes over time
4. Focus on Average engagement time per session as the key metric

Step 5: Understand the Differences – Reports vs. Explorations

Feature	Customised Reports	Explorations
Purpose	Tailor standard reports for repeat use	Ad hoc deep dive analysis
Dimensions/Metrics	Focused and summarised	Vast and flexible
Visualization	Simple chart and table options	Many techniques (funnel, path, segment overlap)
Who it’s for	Report consumers (e.g., marketing managers)	Data analysts or strategic decision-makers
Use case example	View top traffic sources with conversions	Explore user journeys that lead to purchases

Step 6: Business Questions You Can Answer With Custom Reports

Business Question	Customisation Tip
What is the conversion rate for key events across campaigns?	Add conversion metrics + campaign dimension
How are my custom audience segments engaging with content?	Include custom dimensions (e.g., membership level or signup source)
How much revenue does organic search generate?	Filter by source/medium = “google / organic” and show revenue metric
Are site changes improving engagement on mobile?	Filter platform = web, break down by device category, use Avg. engagement time metric

Final Tips

• Use custom reports to monitor performance regularly
• Use explorations for deep analysis or strategic decision-making
• Add your custom reports to the Library and include them in report collections for easier access