What is a Custom Report in Google Analytics?

A custom report in Google Analytics is your own special window into your website's data, built from scratch using only the metrics and dimensions you care about. Instead of relying on Google’s pre-built reports, you can pick and choose your own data points to answer specific questions about your business. This article will walk you through why you need custom reports and how to build your own from the ground up in Google Analytics 4.

When Should You Use a Custom Report?

Google Analytics’s standard reports (now found in the “Reports snapshot” in GA4) are great for a quick overview of your website’s health. They answer common questions like “How many people visited my site yesterday?” or “Where is my traffic coming from?”

However, you'll often have more specific questions that standard reports can't answer. That's when you need a custom report.

Use a custom report when you want to:

• See specific data combos: Standard reports often limit which dimensions and metrics you can see together. A custom report lets you combine nearly any data point, like seeing your top landing pages broken down by the specific device someone used to view it and the ad campaign that brought them there — all in one place.
• Focus only on your KPIs: A standard report might show you 20 different metrics, but only three of them are your key performance indicators (KPIs). You can build a custom report showing just your most important metrics so you can cut through the noise.
• Share simplified data: If you need to send a performance report to your boss or a client, they might not need every single data point. You can create a clean, simple custom report with just the bottom-line numbers they need to see.
• Analyze a specific segment of your audience: Want to see how new visitors from your email campaigns behave differently than returning visitors from organic search? A custom report lets you slice and dice your data to analyze incredibly specific user journeys.

A Quick Note: In GA4, Custom Reports are called "Explorations"

If you're used to Google's previous version, Universal Analytics (UA), you’ll remember the "Customization" section where you built "Custom Reports." In Google Analytics 4, this functionality has been supercharged and renamed. You’ll now find it under the Explore Tab.

The "Exploration" workspace in GA4 is far more powerful and flexible than the old custom reports in UA. It offers a free-form, canvas-style environment where you can drag and drop your data to build tables and charts, analyze funnels, and map user paths with more control than ever before. For the rest of this tutorial, we'll be walking through how to use GA4's Explorations to build your reports.

The Building Blocks of a GA4 Exploration

Before jumping in, let's get familiar with the key components you'll use to build your exploration. Think of these as your Lego bricks for data analysis.

• Technique: This is the format of your report. GA4 offers several templates like "Funnel exploration" or "Path exploration." The most flexible and common type is "Free form," which lets you build custom tables and charts.
• Dimensions: These are the attributes of your data — the descriptive "what" or "who." Examples include Page title, Country, Device category, or Campaign name.
• Metrics: These are the numbers — the quantitative "how many" or "how much" that you're measuring for each dimension. Examples include Sessions, Total users, Conversions, and Event count.
• Filters: These let you narrow down your report to show only data that meets certain criteria. For instance, you could filter your report to only include data from a specific country or for pages that start with "/blog/".
• Segments: These let you group together certain users or sessions based on shared characteristics. For example, you could create a segment of "Users who made a purchase" and compare their behavior to "Users who abandoned their cart."

How to Build Your First Custom Report in GA4: A Step-by-Step Guide

Theory is great, but let's see this in action. We'll build a practical 'Content Performance Report'.

Our Goal: To see which of our blog posts are most popular, which traffic sources bring in the most engaged readers to those posts, and what the engagement rate is for each. Standard reports make it tough to connect all three of those things at once.

Step 1: Go to the Explore Tab

Log into your GA4 account. In the left-hand navigation menu, click on the icon for “Explore.” This will take you to your Explorations hub.

Step 2: Start a "Free form" Exploration

In the Explorations workspace, you'll see a gallery of templates. Click on the "Blank" or "Free form" option to start your report from scratch.

Step 3: Name Your Report

In the top left, give your exploration a descriptive name. Change "Untitled Exploration" to something like "Content & Blog Post Performance." This helps you find it again later.

Step 4: Add Your Dimensions

In the first column, named "Variables," you will see the Dimensions section with a "+" icon. Click it to open a list of all available dimensions in GA4. We need to tell GA4 which descriptive attributes we want to use.

Let's add:

• Page title: This will show us the name of our blog posts.
• Session source / medium: This will tell us where our traffic came from (e.g., google / organic, facebook / cpc).
• Page path and screen class: We'll use this later for filtering our results.

Use the search bar to find each one, check the box next to them, and then click the "Import" button in the upper right. They will now appear in your Dimensions list in the "Variables" column.

Step 5: Add Your Metrics

Right below Dimensions, you’ll find Metrics. Click the "+" sign there. Now we add the numbers we want to measure.

Let's add:

• Views: The number of times your pages were seen.
• Total users: The count of unique users who viewed the page.
• Engagement rate: The percentage of engaged sessions on your site.

Search for these metrics, check the box next to them, and hit "Import."

Step 6: Build the Report Canvas

This is where the magic happens. The big area to your right is the "Tab Settings" column and the report canvas. You construct your report by dragging and dropping dimensions and metrics here.

• Drag Page title from the "Variables" column onto the "Rows" field in the "Tab Settings" column.
• Drag Session source / medium from "Variables" onto the "Columns" field.
• Drag all your metrics (Views, Total users, Engagement rate) from "Variables" onto the "Values" field.

Immediately, your report table on the right will populate with data. You can now see your pages as rows and your traffic sources as columns.

Step 7: Apply a Filter

Right now, our report is showing all pages on our site. We want to see just the blog posts. This is where filters come in handy. Assuming your blog posts are in a subdirectory like example.com/blog/my-first-post, we can filter by the page path.

• In the "Tab Settings" column, find the "Filters" section at the bottom.
• Drag the Page path and screen class dimension onto the filter box.
• Set the filter logic to "contains" and then type "/blog/" into the box.
• Click "Apply."

Your report will update instantly, showing only data related to your blog posts.

Advanced Tips for Better Custom Reports

Once you've built a basic report, you can add more layers to it.

• Add Visualizations: The default view is a table, but in the "Tab Settings" menu, under "Visualization," you can instantly change your report to a Donut chart, Line chart, Bar chart, or even a Geomap if your data includes geographic dimensions.
• Start With a Specific Question: The best reports don't just vomit out data. They're designed to answer one specific question. Before you build, write out the question you want answered, such as "Which of our paid social campaigns are driving the most conversions on mobile devices?" This clarity will guide which dimensions and metrics you choose.
• Start Small and Iterate: Don't try to build the ultimate business dashboard on your first try. Create a simple report focused on one area. Once you find an interesting insight, duplicate the report and build a new version that digs deeper into that finding. Good analysis is an iterative process.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics offers powerful tools for data analysis, but a perfect report depends on good questions, not just data. Custom explorations in GA4 are your way of forcing the tool to give you answers on your terms, showing you the exact insights you need to make better decisions for your business or marketing campaigns.

If you're finding the GA4 interface to be a bit cumbersome and just want to get quick answers, you may find that natural language reporting is a great alternative. We built Graphed for exactly this purpose - to connect your Google Analytics account and enable you to create real-time reports and dashboards without touching a single button in GA4. Instead of digging through menus, you can just ask a question like, "Show me my top 10 blog posts by pageviews from organic search this month," and get a complete report in seconds.