User device data in your GA4 traffic reports

Device data reports provide information about the tech that people are using to access your website and app. Like most of the dimensions that describe the user as a whole (rather than belonging to a specific event), these should be used to both determine your spread of traffic as well as which type of traffic engages/converts better on the website. This will give you a good starting point to investigate whether and how you can improve your performance.

Major dimensions to check out

• Device Category: This is just whether someone used a desktop/laptop computer to access your website, a tablet, a mobile or a smart TV. For many websites the main difference in user engagement and flow will be between mobile vs non-mobile. It’s common for mobile conversion rates to be lower although if your vertical is likely to have people eager to contact you and/or your mobile calls to action are prominent, it may be higher. It’s also common to be biased towards one device type when making website changes. If 70% of your traffic is from mobile, you should be spending 70% of your design and UX optimisation type on the mobile experience.
• Platform: This is only relevant if you have both a website and at least one app. If you do, this will split your traffic between Web, iOS and Android (and any other app stores you may be on), so like Device Category it provides a great top-line of which audience is the most engaged.
• Browser: This lists specific browser names such as Chrome, Safari etc. If you have browser-specific issues (eg. your checkout has a bug only for Microsoft Edge), comparing browser conversion rates is an easy way to uncover this. Note that many browsers now block Google Analytics entirely (or in certain browsing modes), this traffic will be missing from all reports. To see the list of browsers, go to cookiestatus.com.
• App Version: If you have a mobile app this one is also important, so you can see how many people are using older or outdated versions of the app. When you launch a new app version, not everyone will update straight away so you have a natural A/B test. You can compare your most recent vs other versions of the app and if the latest one doesn’t convert as well you can start digging into why.

More granular dimensions

The following dimensions provide a lot more granular data: browser version, device, device brand, device model, operating system, screen resolution, language.

In our experience unless you’re trying to use GA4 to investigate a very particular technical performance issue, the dimensions in the above section should be more than enough.

One possible exception is Language if your target audience speaks multiple languages or a non-majority language. However note that this data is not going to be very complete as it comes from the language that the user has set the browser to. For example, you might have a bunch of users searching in Ukrainian in search engines and clicking through to your website. But not all of them would have actually bothered to set their browser to be in Ukrainian so the languages report wouldn’t cover them all. It might still be useful though if you’re targeting a specific non-English linguistic community in Australia, because we know if someone has bothered to set their browser to a non-English language it probably means they are a lot more comfortable with that language compared to English, and you can compare their website behaviour to an English-speaking audience accordingly.