Easy Changes To Make in Google Analytics 4 to Make Me Not Hate It So Much

Usually when Google updates to its products, at first it looks weird and I don't like it. Then, flash forward a month and I can't imagine it ever going back. However, in the case of GA4. I'm 2 years into using it and I still prefer the prior version of Universal Analytics. I know it's not coming back, but here's a few simple usability changes Google can make to Google Analytics 4....

1. Calendar

GA4 changed the default date range to a 28 day range. Yes, you can still open up the calendar feature and date select what range you want. However, it got rid of the quick selects for this month, last month. Those happen to be really useful date ranges people look at often. Especially since Google Ads lets you select by this month and last month. It's really annoying to have to open up the calendar date select to find the exact dates of last month.

2. Percent (%) to Total

Something GA Universal did that was nice was it would tell you the percent to total of a metric inside a list. For example, if you were looking at site traffic and wanted to see a list of the top sources it would display the metric and next to it, tell you what percent that was of the overall total. It was really handy and for some reason Google decided to get rid of that.

3. Clickable Links

If I'm looking at a list in GA4 and I want to drill in or isolate a specific item, I have to go through and setup a filter. GA-UA would offer these are hyperlinks. All you needed to do was click in to drill deeper in. The new way isn't hard but it's more annoying for sure.

    4. Advanced Filtering Search Box

Filtering still exists in GA4 but now it requires a few more steps. Before there was a simple "advanced" button next to the search box in a list. If the user clicked it, it would open an easy to use advanced filter where you could select different dimensions or metrics. Again, Google removed that.

    5. Adding a second metric to graphs

Graphs are useful to both novice and advanced users, so being able to alter them easily is a huge benefit. Before, Google gave users the option to add a second metric just by clicking a button. It was easy to do and very obvious how to do that. Unfortunately the ease of that has gone away in GA4.