A weekly analysis workflow with Explore

Here is a weekly review for a SaaS marketing site, as a sequence of GA4 moves.

1. Check the snapshot (5 min). Reports snapshot with Compare: previous period. Note the Insights cards. Anything moved more than 20%? Write it down as a question, not an answer.

2. Confirm the plumbing (3 min). Events report: are page_view, sign_up, generate_lead counts in their normal range? A sudden zero is a broken tag, and every other number this week is suspect until it is fixed.

3. Acquisition table (10 min). Explore, free form. Rows: Session default channel group, then Session campaign nested. Columns: Week. Values: Sessions, Engagement rate, Key events, Session key event rate. Cell type: heat map. Filter Sessions > 30. The heat map shows which campaign's conversion rate fell.

4. Landing pages (10 min). Second tab, same exploration. Rows: Landing page + query string. Values: Sessions, Engagement rate, Key events. Apply a segment Session default channel group = Paid Search on this tab only. Sort by sessions, look for pages with engagement rate well below the tab average; those are the pages burning ad money.

5. The funnel (10 min). Third tab, funnel: page_view of /pricing, then sign_up, then tutorial_begin. Closed, breakdown by Device category, elapsed time on. Compare with last week by switching to the trended funnel. If mobile step 2 dipped, open Next action to see where mobile users went instead.

6. Users (5 min). Right-click the leaky step, View users, and read three timelines in User explorer.

7. Share. Explorations are personal, so share the exploration read-only, or export the two tables to Google Sheets. For a standing dashboard, connect Looker Studio to the property with its native GA4 connector; it uses the Data API, so it shares its quotas and can sample; keep dashboards to a few charts.

Save it as Weekly review with named tabs; next week only the date range changes.