In a lot of small offices, the website report is a ritual. Every Monday someone opens Google Analytics 4, takes three or four screenshots, pastes them into an email and sends it before the team meeting.
It takes about half an hour. By Wednesday the numbers are stale. Nobody can click into them, so the questions in the meeting ("is that up or down?", "where are these visitors coming from?", "what about last month?") turn into another round of screenshots.
Looker Studio (Google has started calling it Data Studio again) is free and reads GA4 directly. You build the report once, and everyone opens the same link with live numbers. This post walks through the one-page version I teach: three headline numbers, a trend, a channel table and a date control. No code, no paid connector.
A note on numbers: the lesson's screens come from a real GA4 property, so every figure on them is blurred. I won't quote any here either. What matters is the structure, and that works the same on any site.
What you end up with
One page that answers the three questions people actually ask:
- How are we doing? Three scorecards across the top: Active users, Sessions and Engagement rate for the last 28 days.
- Going up or down? A time series of Active users per day.
- Where do visitors come from? A table with one row per channel (Organic Search, Direct, Referral, Organic Social and so on), with Sessions and Engagement rate.
Plus a date range control, so anyone can switch the whole page to the last 30 days, last quarter or a custom range without asking you.
What you need
- A Google account that can read a GA4 property. The Viewer role in GA4 is enough.
- No property of your own? Google's free GA4 demo account (the Google Merchandise Store) works for practice.
Part 1: connect GA4 and add the headline
- Open lookerstudio.google.com and click Create a report.
- Click Google Analytics. The first time, Data Studio asks you to Authorize the connector to read your Analytics accounts. That is a one-time permission on your own Google account.
- Pick the account, then the GA4 property, and click Add (then Add to report if it asks).
- Click Untitled Report and give it a name people will recognise, such as Website traffic report.
- Add a chart > Scorecard, click on the page, and set the metric to Active users.
- Repeat for Sessions and Engagement rate, and line the three up along the top.
Three terms worth knowing at this point:
- A report is the page people look at. A data source is its saved connection to the data. A connector is the kind of connection (Google Analytics, Google Sheets, BigQuery).
- A scorecard is one metric as one big number for the date range. Three to five are plenty.
- Engagement rate in GA4 is the share of sessions that lasted over 10 seconds, saw two or more pages or included a key event. It is a better "did anyone actually read it?" number than raw sessions.
Part 2: the trend, the channels and the date picker
Open the report and click Edit if it opened in View mode.
The trend
- Add a chart > Time series, pick the first one and click under the scorecards.
- Data Studio draws Active users per day with Date along the bottom. Drag the chart's edge so it is about half the page wide, leaving room for a table.
The channel table
- Add a chart > Table, pick the first one and place it to the right of the chart.
- The table starts with Date as its dimension. In Setup, click Date under Dimension, type
default channeland pick Session default channel group. - Under Metric, set Sessions, then Add metric > Engagement rate. The table sorts by Sessions.
The date control
- Add a control > Date range control and place it at the top right.
- Click View to see the page the way your colleagues will.
- Open the control, change Auto date range to Last 30 days and click Apply. Every chart on the page switches.
The one idea that makes the rest easy
Every chart in Looker Studio is one dimension and one or more metrics:
| Chart | Dimension (what you group by) | Metric (what you count) |
|---|---|---|
| Scorecard | none | Active users |
| Time series | Date | Active users |
| Channel table | Session default channel group | Sessions, Engagement rate |
In the Data panel, dimensions are green and metrics are blue. Swap the table's dimension to Page path and the same numbers regroup into a top-pages table. Once that clicks, a new chart is three clicks, not a tutorial.
Two things to get right before you share
Controls change the view, not the report. When a colleague picks Last 30 days, it changes their view only. Everyone else still opens the default (last 28 days) until an editor changes it. That is what you want: nobody can break the report by exploring it.
Sharing gives access to the numbers. A new report is private. Once you share it, anyone you add sees its numbers even if they don't have their own GA4 access. Share by email with the people who need it, on purpose, and check View mode first, because that's exactly what they'll get.
How to read it on Monday
Instead of a screenshot email, send the link once and use the meeting for decisions:
- Scorecards up or down against the last period?
- Which channel brings the most sessions, and which has the best engagement rate? Those are often different channels, and the gap is usually the most useful thing on the page.
- Did the trend move after something you did (a newsletter, a new page, a campaign)?
Practice it step by step
The lesson, Looker Studio: Add a Trend Chart, Channel Table and Date Control, walks through every click above on real Data Studio screens (numbers blurred, no account touched). Part 1 is its own module: Connect GA4 and Build Your First Report. Both are in the free Looker Studio Basics course, and there's a one-page Looker Studio cheat sheet and a short explainer on the date range control.
Practice it step by step, free: https://learn.ynteractive.com/content/looker-studio-ga4-dashboard
Top comments (1)
the sharing note is the part i would keep in front of people. a link that opens live numbers is a different permission from a screenshot, so it is worth checking who can open it before it goes round the team.