Many people using Google Analytics do very little beyond setting up an account, and then popping in to see the data in its built-in predefined reports from time to time. With the new Google Analytics 4, there are some standard reports, but it encourages us to create the reports we really need, and that’s a good thing.
GA4 has ‘overview reports’, which are more like dashboards with little ‘cards’ showing some very limited data on a range of things, usually focusing more on the charts than the numbers. And then there are ‘detail reports’, which are primarily data tables.
Don’t be led astray
I’d highly recommend (as I’ve always done) that we all try to specify the data we actually want from Google Analytics, and then try to create those reports, rather than being led by the system’s predefined stuff. It’s highly unlikely that anything offered to us will be exactly what we want, so learning how to create customised reports should be our first big project after setting up our new GA4 account. There’s a great introduction called How to Customize Reports in Google Analytics 4 on the Analytics Mania blog.