Editor's note: This post was updated in October 2026 to reflect current Google Analytics reporting features, including collection templates, Realtime navigation changes, and report filters.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) organizes reporting around collections, topics, and reports that you can reshape to fit each team. The report menu and the look and feel of reports are built around the event data model Google Analytics uses to collect data from your website or mobile app. Here I will provide tips for different components to help you customize your GA4 reporting.
GA4 reporting and menu components
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| # | Component | Allowance | Permissions |
| 1 | Reports snapshot | 1 | edit |
| 2 | Realtime overview | 1 | remove, restore |
| 3 | Realtime pages | 1 | remove, restore |
| 4 | Collection (section headers in the navigation, e.g., Business objectives) |
7 | edit, create, delete |
| 5 | Collection topic (items within a collection, e.g., Generate leads) | 5 per collection | edit, create, delete |
| - | Overview report | 150 | edit, create, delete |
| - | Detail report | 200 | edit, create, delete |
| 6 | Custom dashboards | 15 cards per dashboard (30 in Google Analytics 360) | create, edit, publish |
| 7 | Data import | 1 | remove, restore |
| 8 | Library | 1 | edit, create |
As a GA4 Property Editor or Administrator, you can fully customize the reporting menu to fit the needs of your organization.
How to customize the GA4 Reports snapshot
The snapshot report (or Reports snapshot) is an overview that users will see once they click Reports in the Google Analytics 4 menu. By default, the snapshot report includes metrics outlined in what Google calls “cards.” Cards are created when you create custom detail reports. The real value of customizing the snapshot report is in the strategy behind creating and choosing which cards to include.
Report snapshot tips:
- Remove the clutter. If you don’t sell items or track revenue don’t include cards that have that empty data.
- Learn what type of visualizations make the most impact. Cards can be a bar chart, pie chart, line chart, or a table.
- When choosing multiple dimensions for your card, put the one that people will likely choose most often at the top so it becomes the default. For example, do you report more often by campaign, source, or medium?
- Narrow dimensions that are most relevant to your business. For example, if you operate solely or collect data from one country, show users by region or city rather than country to eliminate unnecessary clicking.
- You only have one snapshot. My advice is to choose the most important dimension/metric combination from each overview report you have and display it here.
Edits to the snapshot report and any custom report within the navigation will be reflected for everyone.
Using the GA4 Realtime report
As your Google Analytics 4 property collects data through the Data Streams connected to your website(s) and/or mobile app(s) the Realtime report lets you monitor the activity as it happens. These reports can’t be changed but you can add comparisons to them, and editors can remove them from the left navigation or add them back. Like the Reports snapshot, these reports also have cards providing data such as the count of users in the last 30 minutes and event counts by event name.
Realtime report tips:
- See how overall traffic is affected from a recent press release or social media update.
- Monitor spikes from specific traffic sources, mediums, or campaigns.
- Verify that the tracking code is working on your site or app.
- Watch for increases in views of specific content such as pages (web) or screens (app).
- Use View user snapshot to troubleshoot or confirm proper user flows are taken.
The user snapshot feature within the Realtime report can be useful to see a user’s device, app version, location, and top events triggered during their visit.
GA4 report library
This is where the real magic happens and how you can begin making GA4 reporting work for you. Here you will find two types of assets called Reports and Collections. Reports will ultimately consist of “cards” that were mentioned earlier and once your reports are created, you will then choose the most appropriate way to categorize them into collections and eventually be displayed in the report menu.
Adding custom reports to GA4 navigation with collections
A collection is a set of reports that you and other editors have created. You can create your own collections as well as edit or remove the default collections already provided. The Life cycle and User collections appear in the report navigation by default when a GA4 property is created.
When you create a collection, you can start from a blank canvas or from one of Google's templates. Along with Life cycle and User, the templates include Business objectives, which builds a tailored set of reports from information you provide about your business, as well as Search Console, App developer, and Games reporting. Collections built from a template stay linked and pick up Google's updates automatically. You can unlink a collection for full control, but that choice is permanent because an unlinked collection can't be linked again.
Tips using collections:
- Preserve the default collections by unpublishing or making copies to easily “reset” the reporting navigation and reports.
- Work within your teams to determine helpful reports and menu structure.
- Only one overview report per topic.
- Keep in mind that you are limited to seven collections.
- Only published collections show up in the navigation.
- Collections appear in the navigation alphabetically by name and can't be reordered, so name them with the order you want in mind.
- In Google Analytics 360 properties, admins can manage which users have access to each collection.
Creating custom reports in GA4
Custom reports allow you to start building out the structure of your collections with two types of reports: Overview and Detail reports, and custom dashboards add a third way to bring key metrics together.
GA4 Overview reports
An Overview report is a dashboard that summarizes the detail reports in a topic using cards.
Need to know:
- A topic can have only one overview report.
- An overview report can contain up to 16 cards.
- Each card created must contain at least one dimension, one metric, and one visualization.
- Summary cards are used to build your overview reports but they are sourced from detail reports.
GA4 Detail reports and filters
A Detail report can have up to two visualizations and a table.
Need to know:
- Detail reports can contain report data (dimensions and metrics), charts, a report template, and summary cards.
- Linked objects receive updates from Google. If Google adds a dimension to the User acquisition report, the dimension will automatically be added to all linked User acquisition reports
- You can apply filters to detail reports to narrow each report to the data a specific team needs.
Building custom dashboards in GA4
Custom dashboards give editors a faster way to build a single-page view of key metrics. Instead of defining cards in detail reports first, you drag dimensions and metrics straight onto a grid, then publish the dashboard directly to the left navigation. Dashboards don’t yet support segments or card-level comparisons, so analysis that depends on them still belongs in standard reports or Explorations.
Where to go after standard GA4 reports
The streamlined reporting in Google Analytics will give end users easy access to curated reports, providing key metrics and key events they love at their fingertips.
When your teams are ready to answer more complex questions, the next step usually lives outside standard reports. Explorations handle ad hoc analysis inside Google Analytics, and our look at GA4 Explore reports breaks down when to use each technique instead of standard reporting. For analysis that brings in data from other sources, Looker Studio and the BigQuery export take you further, and our guide to GA4 fundamentals covers the data model and essential features those tools build on.
If you'd like help building a reporting structure around how your teams use data, we'd love to talk.
