You may have noticed that when you fresh-install GA4Dataform, it creates two files in your custom directory with queries that produce demo tables.
demo_daily_sessions_report– this is a reporting table that aggregates metrics per day over lots of session dimensionsdemo_diagnostics– this is a reporting table with health information (like cardinality, self-referrals, ecommerce events without items, etc)
I’m not expecting you to look at the table itself. This table is built to be read in a data visualisation tool.
Now.. we can do visualisation a bit, but we’re not experts.
But the community is already working! Our good friend (and now BFF) Mehdi Oudjida is a Looker Studio expert and created a Looker Studio Template for the Sessions demo table!
What can you do with this table (and report)?
You can use the report as
- Monitor for metrics like sessions / page views / engagement / time spent / ecommerce outcomes per session
- Landing page report (per content_group)
- Device drilldown
- Country drilldown
- Marketing performance report – including the much beloved Default Channel Grouping
A short demo video of the demo table in the demo report
How to make this your own?
If you open the report, you can copy it, so YOU own it. And then open the instructions tab and follow the steps Mehdi described. In summary:
- Browse to you GA4Dataform outputs dataset
- Select the demo_daily_sessions_report
- Connect it & Done!
Of course, the prerequisite is that you have run the GA4Dataform processing at least once
Make your own customisations? The floor is yours!
Missing metrics or dimensions? You can add them.
Since this table is in your custom directory, you can – with some SQL – edit the source file in Dataform and add/remove your custom dimensions and metrics.
It’s YOUR playground, and you won’t have to worry about breaking the core tables!
What’s next?
We love data! We love models! But we also love when people actually look at their data in order to actually do something with all the collected information.
Visualisation helps a lot. So we love visualisation, too! So when kind people like Mehdi create free templates for our tables: awesomeness.
But we won’t sit still ourselves. On our quest to make GA4Dataform as valuable as possible, we certainly have Reporting Tables and Visualisations on our roadmap.
So: Follow us in our journey in 2025, and meanwhile: please share what YOU create with GA4Dataform!
