While I embrace using GA4, I have a secret to share... I hate the interface. It's not user-friendly or intuitive, and often I find it limiting to get to the data I want quickly. But thankfully there are many applications you can use to access your GA4 data and get insights much faster. Just in time for Valentine's Day, here are my four companion apps I use with GA4 that I know you'll fall in love with too.
Looker Studio
Cost: FREE
Looker Studio is primarily a data visualization tool, allowing you to create impressive and customizable dashboards. But in addition to its great visualization options, Looker Studio provides us with a way to reformat or share data from GA4 in different ways. Here are four of my favorite aspects when coupling Looker Studio with GA4 data.
Scheduling Reports
In Universal Analytics, we were able to schedule and email reports. But GA4 seems to have skipped this functionality. Thankfully you can recreate a report in Looker Studio using GA4 data and it does have scheduling and emailing capabilities.
Report User Management
While GA4 allows users to create customized reports in Explorations, when you share these reports with others, you can't select specific users to share with. This means any report sharing in GA4 is shared with all users with access to that GA4 property. Looker Studio, however, allows you to select specific individuals to access a report.
User Report Flexibility
Along the same lines as the user management issue, when you do share a GA4 Explorations report with others, the report is read-only. This means that those viewing the report can't even update the date range in the report. To make any changes (including date range) to the report, the user must make their own copy of the report. In Looker Studio, however, you can create a report and provide users with a control (such as a date range control) which allows them to update or filter the report without changing the core report template.
Custom Calculated Metrics on the Fly
While you can create calculated metrics in GA4, you're limited to the data you already have in GA4. So for instance, if you want Facebook Ads cost data and Google Ads cost data in the same table, you won't have this data in GA4 (unless you perform a data import of the Facebook Ads data). Looker Studio allows you to create calculated metrics on the fly, combining data from multiple sources, including GA4.
❤️ Supermetrics
Cost: Free Trial
This is perhaps my FAVORITE GA4 companion app! I use Supermetrics with Google Sheets and it allows me to pull in data from GA4 as well as other platforms, like Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads, in one place (Google Sheets). From there, I can manipulate the data the way I want and combine it together, then send the data to whatever platform I want, such as Looker Studio for a dashboard, report or visualization. Supermetrics works with the GA4 API to pull in all sorts of dimensions and metrics, and it can be scheduled as well. For example, for dashboards, I may have queries scheduled daily and for reports I may schedule them to update monthly. There's a free trial but it is a paid tool, although I think it's fully worth the investment.
GA4 Add-On
Cost: FREE
If you're looking for a free way to pull GA4 data to Google Sheets or only need GA4 data (not other platforms), you can also use Google's GA4 Reports Builder for Google Analytics. add-on. This tool allows you to pull data via the GA4 API without any programming knowledge and pull that data into Google Sheets. One very handy feature is that you can add Google Sheets formulas to the Report Configuration sheet. For example, if you were to use the add on for monthly reports, you could enter the report data's start date and end date as formulas so that they automatically update each month [ex: =eomonth(today(), -2)+1 would be the first day of last month]. This add on also has scheduling options, so you can set when it should run, which is great for regular reporting.
❤️ Zapier
Cost: Varies, but there is a free level.
Zapier is probably one of my favorite apps for everything. Zapier is a tool that makes connecting APIs very easy. With Zapier, you don't have to know how to program anything! It's simply a "recipe" you create to get data from one source and pass it to another. Zapier has a GA4 connection, and you can pass your GA4 data to many other apps from there and vice-versa. For example, I have a client who uses Stripe Payment Links for their site. Using Zapier, we're able to accurately pass ecommerce data back from Stripe to GA4.
Got a favorite GA4 companion app? Share it below!