DEV Community: Sasireka Balasubramaniyam

GA4 report snapshot templates: User behavior, Sales and marketing performance

Sasireka Balasubramaniyam — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:22:22 +0000

Acquiring users to our website is not easy, and bringing them back is more difficult. But if our content reaches people, it will increase the sales and revenue. Initially, we can’t manually collect visitors’ data from our website. By using Google Analytics, we can achieve it. It details your data in numbers and in a report format.

What is GA4 and why it is used?

The Google Analytics dashboard is one of Google's products. This dashboard is a visual representation of metrics and key performance indicators (KPI). It is mainly used to track your website analysis. Google Analytics consists of some pre-built templates inside the report section to explore data visually. These pre-built templates help to save your time for building manual reports from scratch.

Let’s build a Google Analytics report snapshot

If you’ve never used Google Analytics, then just open https://developers.google.com/analytics and log in with your email. Next, create an account for your website. It asks for your website URL and fill other details correctly.

If you have an account just skip the above step. After creating the account, you have to add the script to all pages, and then it will track the events that happen on your website. You can find the tag in Admin → Data streams → Select the stream you provide → Scroll down and find ‘View tag instructions’ → Select ‘Install Manually’

Choose the report snapshot template based on your business needs. Specific and accurate data will enough for detail analysis. This GS4 snapshot customization allows you to setup the dashboard as your needs.

Template 1: User behavior

If you just want to see your website overview, top pages and screens data, daily users count like active users, new users and how many returning users, engagement metrics like engagement sessions, average engagement time, scrolling and events. This template is enough to find those metrics in one dashboard.

From this data you can optimise your website UI and content quality to bring more traffic. This template is more useful for content creators who can check which article page brings more attention, developers who can identify whether the new page or content reaches after deployment, and any site that focuses on engagement more than revenue.

Template 2: Sales and Revenue 💰

If you are running ecommerce business website or any other platform like Shopify, WooCommerce, or developers with in-app purchases and subscriptions on their website, or business owners who want to track their revenue-driving product for those, this template gives you the relevant metrics for your easy analysis. You can identify the top-performing product, which drives more revenue.

This template directly connects the traffic sources with your revenue. So that you can identify the reason why revenue drops even though traffic is high and optimise the solution. It clearly describes which channels drive more traffic and purchases.

Template 3: Marketing performance

This template measures marketing channel performance and attribute conversions. This template is best for digital marketers who run multiple-channel campaigns, SEO specialists to track their organic growth vs paid, and marketing teams who optimise and handle ad spend across all platforms like Google Ads, Meta and email.

This template covers some important things:

Channel groupings - organic, paid, social, referral searches side by side
New users and returning users acquisition by their source or medium
Conversion data - which channel gets more credits

By knowing these template types, you can get the actual dashboard you want. You can avoid unwanted data. For example, if you are running a website for posting articles and there is no payment and subscription or purchase option, then there is no purchase data available in your Google Analytics report dashboard. So, you can clearly choose the ‘User behavior’ template.

Initially, you can choose only one template for one account. Later, you can customise this from Reports → library. I read about the important metrics in the blog https://agentzee.ai/blogs/google-analytics-report-template-the-10-metrics-every-business-owner-should-track. It makes you clearer. If you have any doubts or suggestions post them in the comments. Let's discuss.

Accessing Google Ads data via API is easy

Sasireka Balasubramaniyam — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:21:25 +0000

If you are going to build automation tools or marketing dashboards for Google Ads data, you need to pull it out through the API. It is easier than you think. This tutorial helps you access Google Ads data via API.

Before this, you should have a Google Ads manager account and some campaign data. Next, we need to create a cloud project.

What is Google Cloud project? And why is it needed?

Google Cloud project is act like an intermediator between the user and the user’s Google Ads account. You heard about authentication and authorisation. In technical we use OAuth. For this process we create a project with a secret ID and a key.

Google Ads API integration

Step 1: Creating a cloud project

Open the Google Cloud console https://console.cloud.google.com/.
If you have an account and project, just use it. Otherwise create a new project.
Click the console in the top right corner and then open ‘My First Project’. Create new project with all necessary data.

Step 2: Creating client ID and secret

This client ID and secret will be used for authentication purpose later.

Search ‘Google OAuth Platform’ and click ‘Clients’
If you created a new project, then it asks for the project configuration. Fill in all the necessary data. Otherwise create a client.
Go to Clients → Create client. It asks for application type, based on your need choose one.
Then fill in the application name and the redirect URI for callback. The redirect URI will be valid.
Download your credential file, and it disappears after closing the tab.
This JSON consists of client ID and client secret, and other credentials.
If you have any doubts about this step, just refer to the blog https://agentzee.ai/blogs/how-to-access-google-ads-manager-data-via-api-with-an-access-token#steps-to-applying-for-a-developer-token.

Step 3: Enable Google Ads API

Search for ‘APIs and Services’
Click ‘Enable APIs and services’
Search for Google Ads API and click the ‘Enable’ button.

Step 4: Apply for a developer token

Open your Google Ads account dashboard https://ads.google.com/.
Go to Admin → API center. There, you can find the test developer token. For internal use, you can use this token.
For production purposes, you should apply for the ‘Basic level’ or ‘Advanced level’ based on your needs.

Step 5: Generate an access token

After all these now we are going to generate an access token. By using the URL below in the browser we’ll get a ‘code’. We are going to fetch the data on behalf of the user. So we need to perform authentication. For that purpose we need to get the code and exchange it for generating the access token.

This ‘code’ lifetime is very short, so we need to use it immediately.

https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_
ID&redirect_uri=YOUR_REDIRECT_URI&response_type=code&
scope=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/adwords
&access_type=offline&prompt=consent

Here, we need to replace the client ID and redirect URI from the JSON we downloaded before and hit the URL in the browser.
It will redirect to the page we mentioned in the ‘redirect URI.’ Finally, just copy the code from the URL tab.

After copying the code, immediately paste it somewhere and hit the API to generate access token.

   curl -X POST https://oauth2.googleapis.com/token \
     -d "code=AUTHORIZATION_CODE" \
     -d "client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID" \
     -d "client_secret=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET" \
     -d "redirect_uri=YOUR_REDIRECT_URI" \
     -d "grant_type=authorization_code"

Here, replace your code, client ID, client secret, and redirect URI.

Hit the API in Postman or any platform you’ve regularly used.

You’ll see the output like this. Generally, this access token's life span is only one hour.

{
"access_token": "ya29.a0AfH6SMA...",
"expires_in": 3599,
"refresh_token": "1//0gdfgsdfg...",
"scope": "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/adwords",
"token_type": "Bearer"
}

Step 6: Access Google Ads data via API

Now you have an access token and a developer token. Follow the command below in Postman.

curl -X POST "https://googleads.googleapis.com/v16/customers/_CUSTOMER_ID_/googleAds:searc
h" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN" \
-H "developer-token: DEVELOPER_TOKEN" \
-H "login-customer-id: MANAGER_ID" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "query": "
    SELECT
      campaign.id,
      campaign.name,
      metrics.impressions,
      metrics.clicks
    FROM ad_group
    WHERE segments.date DURING LAST_7_DAYS
  "
}'

From this, replace your generated access token, Developer token, and Manager ID from your Google Ads account and CUSTOMER_ID from your Google Ads account. Your response will be like this.

{
  "results": [
    {
      "campaign": {
        "id": "123456789",
        "name": "Search Campaign"
      },
      "metrics": {
        "impressions": "5400",
        "clicks": "320",
      }
    }
  ]
}

For more API references use this link https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/client-libs. By using the APi you can fetch all data that is displayed on your Google Ads dashboard without opening it. It gives easy access to your data.

To know more about this, kindly refer to the above blog. It clearly explains the steps and screenshots. If you have any doubts, refer to and clear.

If you have any doubts or clarifications, don’t hesitate, just leave a comment. I hope this helps.