Building a Google Analytics 4 Dashboard in Data Studio

After you have started tracking your website or apps in Google Analytics 4, you will likely want to create custom reports and dashboards using your GA4 data. These reports can serve as a comparison between GA4 and Universal Analytics while running in parallel and eventually become your source of truth once you have fully migrated to GA4.

In Google Data Studio, you will notice that connecting to GA4 looks a bit different than connecting to UA. Using the built-in Google Analytics connector, you will connect to GA4 at the property-level as there are no views in GA4. You will then see a data schema that may look unfamiliar to you, especially if you’ve become comfortable using UA data in Data Studio. GA4 uses an event-based data model distinct from that of UA, and as a result the available dimensions and metrics are also different.

To compare between UA and GA4 and eventually migrate, you will need to understand how to translate between these two different data models. And that’s what we’re here for! In the rest of this post, we’ll walk-through how to replicate some of the most common metrics and dimensions from UA into GA4.

How to Report on GA4 in Data Studio

Audience

Let’s begin with the most commonly-used set of GA metrics: the Audience Overview. We don’t recommend using these metrics as your key measures of success, but they can provide a high-level picture of activity on your site.

The first six metrics are straightforward, and are either available by default or through a simple calculation:

The last two, Avg. Session Duration and Bounce Rate, don’t map directly to GA4. Yes, that’s right, there’s no bounce rate in GA4! Instead, GA4 automatically tracks a measure of engagement, which is far more sophisticated than bounce rate ever was. This leads to measures of Engaged Sessions, Engagement rate, and Engagement time.

Acquisition

Unfortunately, traffic source dimensions from GA4 are not yet available in Data Studio. We will update this section when this becomes available.

Behaviour

Since GA4 is designed to enable measurement across websites and mobile apps, it is now easier to report on web pages and app screens together. In contrast, pages and pageviews are a distinct concept from screens and screenviews in the UA data model.

Note that in addition to the combined Page title and screen name dimension, there are still separate web-specific dimensions for Hostname, Page path, and Page title.

Conversions

The concept of goals from UA has been replaced by conversions in GA4. A conversion is just a specific event that has been enabled with a “conversion” flag in your GA4 property. To report on conversions in Data Studio, use the Event name dimension along with the Conversions metric. To view just a specific conversion event (e.g. in a scorecard), apply a filter to your chart using the event name.

We hope this gives you a head start on creating a dashboard in Data Studio for your GA4 property. Are there any GA4 dimensions or metrics that you would like to see in Data Studio? Let us know in the comments!

Complete list of posts in our 2020 Data Studio series:

1. Visualizing the COVID-19 Pandemic in Google Data Studio
2. Creating a Google Analytics Dashboard in One Click
3. Using Google Maps in Data Studio
4. Visualizing BigQuery Public Datasets in Data Studio
5. Measuring Web Vitals – Part 2: Monitoring in Data Studio
6. Using Parameters in Data Studio
7. How to Style Links in Data Studio
8. Using Filter Controls in Data Studio
9. Extracting a Theme from an Image in Data Studio
10. Building a Google Analytics 4 Dashboard in Data Studio (this post)
11. How to Convert Text to Dates in Google Data Studio
12. 12 Tips for Enhancing Your Tables in Data Studio