Google Analytics 4 has hundreds of metrics and dimensions. A client report needs about six of them, explained well. Here's what to include, how to explain the parts that confuse people, and the mistakes that quietly make GA4 reports wrong.
The GA4 metrics clients understand
| Metric | What it means in plain English | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions | Visits to the site. One person can make several. | The headline traffic number |
| Engaged sessions | Visits that lasted longer than 10 seconds, viewed at least two pages, or completed a key event. | Separating real visits from quick bounces |
| Engagement rate | Engaged sessions as a share of all sessions. | Traffic quality, especially by channel |
| Views | Pages viewed, including repeats. | Top pages and content performance |
| Key events | Actions you told GA4 to count as important, such as a form submit or purchase. Google called these "conversions" until 2024. | Outcomes, with a caveat (below) |
| Session source / medium | Where each visit came from, such as google / organic or newsletter / email. | The "where visitors came from" table |
GA4's bounce rate is simply the opposite of engagement rate: the share of sessions that weren't engaged. Report one or the other, not both. Engagement rate is the more positive framing and the one GA4 puts first.
Explain the confusing parts once
"Why are users and sessions different?"
Users are people (or more precisely, browsers and devices). Sessions are visits. One person visiting three times is one user and three sessions. Users can't be added up across days or months: someone who visits in both September and October is one user over the two months, not two. If you need a two-month user count, ask GA4 for that range directly.
"What is Unassigned traffic?"
Unassigned means GA4 couldn't match the visit to one of its default channel groups. The usual cause is campaign tags that GA4's channel rules don't recognise, for example utm_medium=blast on a newsletter instead of email. It doesn't mean internal or bot traffic. Keep it in the report and fix the tagging, rather than quietly filtering it out.
"Why don't these numbers match Google Ads?"
They measure different things. Google Ads counts clicks and gives the conversion to the ad that was clicked. GA4 counts sessions and, by default, uses its own attribution model across all channels. A click that doesn't load the page, or a visitor who blocks analytics, shows up in one and not the other. Report each in its own section and say so.
Mistakes that make GA4 reports wrong
- Adding up users. Summing monthly or daily users double counts returning visitors. Use sessions for totals.
- Treating key events as leads. A form-submit event fires for spam and test entries too. If the client has a CRM or a booking system, report confirmed leads from there next to GA4's count.
- Reporting yesterday. GA4 keeps processing recent data for up to a day or two. Leave the last couple of days out of a report, or numbers will change after you send it.
- Mismatched time zones. GA4 days follow the property's time zone. If it's set to the agency's time zone and not the client's, the "day" boundaries won't match their sales data.
- Small numbers hidden by thresholds. With Google signals turned on, GA4 can withhold rows when user counts are low, to protect privacy. If a small channel seems to vanish, that may be why.
- Comparing uneven periods. A 31-day month against a 28-day month flatters one and penalises the other. Compare with the same month last year, or use daily averages.
A GA4 report layout that works
- Three numbers at the top: sessions, engagement rate and your outcome metric (key events, or better, confirmed leads), each against the previous period or last year.
- A daily sessions chart, so spikes and dips have a date attached.
- Traffic sources: source / medium with sessions, share of total and engaged sessions.
- Top pages: the ten most-viewed pages, by title.
- Notes: tracking changes, missing days and the attribution caveat above.
Want to see the finished thing? Here's a sample monthly report built this way, with its PDF and spreadsheet.
Five minutes of setup that improves every report
- Mark the client's real outcomes as key events: purchases, bookings, qualified form submits. Not page views.
- Agree a tagging convention and stick to it: lowercase, and standard mediums such as
email,cpc,paid_socialandreferral. - Link Google Ads and Search Console to the GA4 property.
- Set the property's time zone and currency to the client's.
- Exclude the agency's and the client's own office traffic with an internal traffic rule.
Using Metriclune for GA4 reports
Metriclune connects to GA4 with Google's read-only analytics permission, and can import a property's history back to the day it was created, so year-over-year comparisons work from day one. Reports show sessions, engagement rate, traffic sources and top pages next to YouTube, social and ad data. Unassigned traffic is kept, missing days are marked as missing rather than zero, and GA4 events are labelled as tracking events, not verified signups. See the Google Analytics integration.