Welcome to our series called “Interpreting your GA4 reports”! We want to create a comprehensive guide to reading your GA4 data. Our hope is that it will give people who use GA4 a bit more context around their reports, which will help them make better inferences and decisions. But for the first post let’s do a bit of “what’s in it for me”?

Why look at GA4 data?

Obviously as an analytics agency we are invested in the idea that you should, but you really should try to look at some analytics data before making a whole range of decisions for your website, your marketing and your org. Now if you don’t like GA4 that’s fine, if you’re doing this with PiwikPRO or Amplitude or your own proprietary data warehouse that’s fine. But as of April 2025, GA4 has an 80%+ market share across analytics tools, so if you stumbled on this series chances are you have GA4 and nothing else.

The classic horror story of not using data is the website refresh. We’ve often been approached by orgs looking to refresh their website. A typical reason is they are tired of its look (fair) and they want to simplify things (usually a great thing). However a typical action is to cull a huge number of pages. Now, what percentage of these projects involve actually checking analytics data to see if the refresh is about to result in website traffic absolutely tanking? Very very low. And so we’ve seen many cases of websites absolutely drying up their traffic (to the order of 50% or more) because none of the decision makers thought to consult an external data source.

As Richard Feynman said, The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool.

Isn’t GA4 self explanatory?

We wish! It would make collaborating with clients on projects using GA4 data easier. But it’s not, because:

• Digital analytics is somewhat technical, so many terms might not necessarily be interpreted correctly from a lay perspective
• GA4 is a real-world tool that must capture real data and so make real choices/trade-offs about how it processes this data, and these might not line up with everyone’s intuitions
• The development of GA4 is currently a bit chaotic with both new features and changes to existing features coming all the time

You’ll note that these 3 would apply to most analytics tools. Maybe GA4 is a bit more gung-ho about changing how existing reports/metrics work than we’d like but for any other tool you should still seek to get up to speed.