Back in 2019, I created a Google Data Studio template for Google Analytics (UA) to simplify performance reporting. It quickly became one of my most shared articles, helping countless users understand and visualise their data more effectively.
Now, with the forced transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) complete as of July 1st 2024, users face new challenges. GA4 introduces a powerful but complex interface, leaving many users frustrated as they attempt to adapt.
To help with this transition, I’ve built a custom Looker Studio dashboard tailored for GA4, making reporting intuitive and insightful once again. It’s fairly simple, and straight forward so hopefully is able to help as many site owners as possible.
The dashboard highlights key performance metrics, tracks user engagement trends, and offers device and country-level insights—all presented in a format that’s easy to navigate and customise.
Below, I’ll walk you through how to use and adapt this template for your own needs.
Google Analytics 4 Dashboard
How to Create Your Copy of the Dashboard
- Open the Looker Studio template using the provided link.
- Click “Create new data source” (if you haven’t already linked your GA4 property to Looker Studio).
- Select Google Analytics from the list of connectors.
- Choose your GA4 property and the relevant data stream.
- Save and start customising the dashboard for your reporting needs.
That’s it! You’ll have access to a pre-built dashboard optimised for GA4, which you can further tweak as needed.
Key Features of the Dashboard
Performance Metrics
The dashboard provides rolling 28-day metrics for views, sessions, engaged sessions, and active users. These metrics are displayed in an easy-to-read line chart to help identify trends over time.
Country & Device Breakdown
Understand where your traffic is coming from with aggregated data by country. A trended chart provides insights into emerging markets or anomalies. Additionally, device breakdowns (mobile, desktop, tablet, and smart TV) are visualised, showing user preferences by platform.
Traffic Sources
This section highlights traffic sources by medium and session origin, enabling you to identify which channels are driving the most traffic. Use this to monitor the impact of SEO, paid campaigns, or referral traffic.
Landing Pages
Track the performance of key landing pages, including metrics such as sessions, engaged sessions, and engagement rate. This is particularly useful for understanding which pages are driving user interaction and which may need optimisation.
Customisation Options
Filters at the top of the report allow you to segment your data by medium, landing page, device category, country, and date. Tailor these dimensions to your business needs for even deeper insights.
Dimensions and Metrics Overview
For this dashboard, I selected a combination of dimensions and metrics to offer a clean, actionable snapshot of traffic and engagement. Here’s a breakdown of what’s included and why:
Dimensions
- Page Path and Screen Class: This dimension consolidates all traffic to a single page or screen by stripping out URL parameters (e.g., UTM tags or session-specific details). This results in a clean, accurate view of page performance, free from duplication caused by parameterised URLs.
- Session Medium: Categorises traffic sources into broader groups such as organic, paid, referral, or direct, helping you understand how users are finding your site.
- Session Source: Drills down into specific traffic sources (e.g., Google, Facebook, Bing), so you can identify which platforms or campaigns are delivering traffic.
- Date Range: Allows for flexible analysis across custom time periods, making it easy to compare performance year-over-year or month-over-month.
Metrics
- Sessions: Measures the total number of sessions (visits) for your site or app, giving a baseline of overall engagement.
- Engaged Sessions: Tracks sessions where users actively interacted with your content, such as spending more than 10 seconds on a page, triggering events, or viewing multiple pages/screens.
- Engagement Rate: Shows the percentage of sessions that qualify as engaged, offering a quick gauge of how well your site is holding user attention.
- Average Engagement Time: Provides insight into how much time users spend on your site, helping to assess the quality and relevance of your content.
This thoughtful combination of dimensions and metrics ensures the dashboard provides meaningful insights into traffic sources, user engagement, and page performance—all while keeping the data clean, intuitive, and actionable.
Why This Dashboard?
GA4’s event-driven model provides greater flexibility and deeper insights than Google Analytics (UA), but its complexity can make it daunting for new users. This dashboard streamlines the process, offering a clean, user-friendly interface that prioritises actionable data.
Whether you’re a marketer, analyst, or business owner, this template is designed to save time and improve decision-making by presenting data in a straightforward way.
Make It Your Own
This template is a starting point for your GA4 reporting journey. Feel free to adapt it by adding additional metrics, changing visualisations, or applying your own branding.
I’d love to hear your feedback or see how you’ve customised the dashboard. Share your thoughts and let’s make GA4 reporting easier for everyone!
Explore some of my other guides on GA4 and Looker Studio:
Thanks Jonathan, this is really useful and I like the visualization of the metrics and the way the report is laid out.
How do I get GA4 conversion events to also show up here? Trying to figure out how to add them in as a dimension into the report so I can add them into some of the charts.
Thank you! I’m glad you found the report and visualisations useful. Adding GA4 conversion events is a great idea and can definitely enhance the insights you get from the dashboard. To include GA4 conversion events, here’s what you can do: 1. Ensure Conversion Events Are Set Up in GA4: Double-check that your desired conversion events are correctly configured in GA4 (under Configure > Events > Mark as Conversion). 2. Add Conversion Events to the Data Source: • In Looker Studio, go to Resource > Manage Added Data Sources. • Edit your GA4 data source. • Look for the specific conversion… Read more »