How to use Exploration Report in Google Analytics 4 — Item Purchase Report

Today, we are going to dive in to one of the most useful (Yet Underused) function. The exploration report. Think of it as a blank canvas to draw your analytics story on. Unlike the auto generated reports, this allow you to truly use the data you gathered and paint it out the beauty of data.

Here are the steps to start an exploration report

1. For any analysis project, we need to first find out the problem. What do you want to know? I wanna know which are my top products, I wanna know my user flow. For the sake of example, we take this question: I want to know what are my top selling products in Germany in 2023?
2. Understand the terms: metrics, dimensions and segments . These are the 3 things that make up the report.

• Metrics are the “Numbers” of the data. Example: number of item purchase or total users.
• Dimensions are keyword/name of the data. Example: Page URL, Item name, traffic source.
• Segments are.. Well, just subset of your data. You can cut them out from the bigger data for report. Example: Users from Singapore, Hongkong.

Now, we wanna find out only about Germany. So we should segment our users for country: Germany. Head to Segments and click on the PLUS sign. Next click on User segment, then include the condition of Geography.

Pro tips: Check the audience size after the segmentation at the right side to make sure you are segmenting correctly.

Now we want to know the Metrics. This is the number part of the data. It will be items purchased . Likewise, click on the PLUS sign beside Metrics and select items purchased . Drag this to the values under the setting tab.

Finally, it is Dimension. We can select Item Name for Dimension. Click on the PLUS sign beside Dimension and select Item Name . Now, drag it to ROWS under setting tab.

Lastly, we can set a date filter in Variables and you can sort the table by clicking at the header of items purchase.

It should look something like this:

This is a very simple use case. But we will dive into more for other GA4 exploration use cases. Comment or drop me an email for specific use cases and I will share it in the next GA4 exploration post.

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