GA4 Free-form Explorations

August 23, 2025

Let’s be honest, while the standard reports in Google Analytics 4 are useful, they can sometimes feel a bit… rigid.

You can customise a GA4 report (in the report section) all you want but sometimes you just want a little bit more.

You know there are deeper insights lurking in your data, but you can’t quite get the specific view you need to find them.

If that sounds familiar, you need to get acquainted with Free-form Explorations.

This is your key to building custom charts and tables that answer the precise questions you have about your website’s performance.

Instead of being handed a pre-built report, you get to be the architect, choosing exactly which dimensions and metrics you want to analyse (within reason, GA4 can sometimes be a bit frustrating)

This guide will walk you through, step-by-step, how to build your very first free-form report.

No jargon, just a practical walkthrough.

Table of Contents

What Is a Free-form Exploration?

Think of it as a blank canvas inside GA4.

It’s part of the ‘Explore’ section and allows you to drag and drop different data points to create highly customised tables and graphs.

Want to see how mobile users from organic search are converting compared to desktop users from paid ads?

Freeform is where you build that view.

Free-form report template

Building a Free-Form exploration

The best way to learn is by doing. We’re going to build a simple but powerful report that looks at user sessions and conversion rates by device category.

Step 1: Create a New Blank Exploration

Navigate to the Explore section in the left-hand menu of GA4. You’ll see a few templates, but for our purposes, click on ‘Blank’. By default, this will open up as a freeform report.

You’ll see two main columns: Variables and Tab Settings.

  • Variables is where you’ll import all the ingredients for your report (your dimensions and metrics).

  • Tab Settings is where you’ll assemble those ingredients to actually build the visualisation.

Blank Free Form

Step 2: Add Your Dimensions

Dimensions are the ‘what’ of your data—they describe it. Think categories, channels, or landing pages. For this report, we want to see which devices people are using.

  1. In the Variables column, click the ‘+’ icon next to Dimensions.

  2. In the search bar, type Device category.

  3. Tick the checkbox next to it and click the ‘Import’ button in the top right.

You’ve now got your first dimension ready to go.

Adding device category

Step 3: Add Your Metrics

Metrics are the numbers—the quantitative measurements. They are the ‘how many’ or ‘how much’. We want to see user numbers and their behaviour.

  1. In the Variables column, click the ‘+’ icon next to Metrics.

  2. Search for and select the following:

Click ‘Import’.

Now all your ingredients are sitting in the Variables column, ready for action.

Step 4: Bring Your Report to Life

You’ve probably noticed that your report is still empty. This is a common point where people get stuck. You need to tell GA4 how to arrange the data by moving your variables into the Tab Settings column.

Simply double-click on your dimensions and metrics in the Variables list, or drag and drop them into the corresponding sections in Tab Settings:

  • Add Device Category to Rows.

  • Add Sessions, Engaged sessions, Engagement Rate, and Session conversion rate to Values.

Instantly, your table will populate.

Built Free-Form

Filtering

You can also add a filter to your data. So you could filter it to just show data from a particular country or a particular channel e.g. Organic Search.

But – in order to use a filter, you have to include that metric / dimension in your variables section. It’s needs to be imported in before you can use it as a filter.

Filter option in Free-Form report

From Data to Insight: What Are We Looking At?

In this example, you might immediately see that ‘Desktop’ drives the most traffic and has a higher engagement rate than ‘Mobile’.

This is your first insight!

It prompts a question: “Is there an issue with the mobile experience that’s causing lower engagement?”

This is the power of freeform reports—they don’t just give you data; they give you a starting point for investigation.

Adding Detail

Let’s say you want to know which channels are driving that desktop traffic. Easy.

  1. Go back to your Dimensions in the Variables column and click the ‘+’ button.

  2. Search for and import Session default channel group.

  3. Now, simply double-click it. GA4 will automatically add it to your table, breaking down your device data by channel.

You can now see traffic and engagement for Desktop from Organic Search, Mobile from Paid Social, and so on. This two-layer view gives you a much richer picture of what’s happening.

Free-Form explorations 2 dimensions

Segments

You also have the option to add segments. This allows you to understand the data from different subsets of your users.

Segment GA4

From here you can choose some pre-made templated segments (which might fit the bill) or you can choose to build your own segments.

You’ll have access to:

  • Session Segments: Including data from sessions that include a certain criteria
  • User Segments: Including data from Users that matches a certain criteria
  • Event Segments: where data is included from events that match conditions.

The event segment is new to GA4 (wasn’t included in Universal Analytics) so is a feature that should be explored more perhaps.

Visualisations

I tend to stay mostly focused on  the table visualisation in the Free-Form reports but there are other visualisations available that might illuminate your data and insights to a greater degree.

These are: 

  • Scatter Plot
  • Line Chart
  • Geo Map 
  • Doughnut
  • Bar Chart
Visualisations in the explore section

The Line Chart

I don’t really spend much time with the other visualisations – exccept the line chart.

It can really help to highlight things.

How do I use it?

Say if a member of the marketing team, or a member of the c-suite says something to the effect of “this has happened, we’ve lost sessions (or purchases, or downloads) can you investigate.”

Well I like to use the line chart to help me pinpoint when that might have happened.

With a line chart you have several options available to you that don’t appear in other reports:

  1. Anomaly detection: GA4 will help you uncover where anomalies have occured
  2. Granulartiy: you can review the data by day, week, month and even hour!

Let’s get back to the visualisation, so you’ve seen a steep decline in sessions (for example) well, you can choose a line chart to view sessions over a period of time and see where that happened.

Or if the purchase event (or any other event for that matter) saw a steep decline, you can view where that happened and then see if those pesky devs changed anything on that day.

Remember, if you just want to see purchase event, you would need to filter to just show events that equal purchase.

Line Chart GA4 Free-Form

Data Thresholding

Sometimes, when you try to add very granular dimensions like Age or Gender, you might find that no data appears, or you see a warning message.

This is likely due to data thresholding. It’s a privacy feature Google applies to prevent the identification of individual users when there isn’t a large enough data sample.

It’s not an error; it’s just something to be aware of when you’re working with smaller datasets.

Summary: Your New Go-To Report

Free-Form Explorations take you from being a passive consumer of GA4 data to an active analyst.

You’re in control, able to build reports that directly address your business questions and uncover genuinely useful insights.

By following the steps above, you can:

  • Build a custom report from a blank canvas.

  • Combine dimensions and metrics to get the exact view you need.

  • Add layers of detail to drill down into your data.

  • Switch between different visualisations to better understand performance.

Stop letting the standard reports dictate what you can see. Start building your own.

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

 

Q1: What is a Free-Form exploration in GA4?

A freeform exploration is a tool within the ‘Explore’ section of GA4 that allows you to build fully customised reports. You can select your own combination of dimensions (like traffic source, device, or landing page) and metrics (like sessions, conversions, or engagement rate) and display them in various formats, such as tables, donut charts, and heatmaps.

Q2: Why is my GA4 exploration showing no data?

The most common reason is that you’ve imported your dimensions and metrics into the ‘Variables’ column but haven’t yet moved them into the ‘Tab Settings’ column. You must drag and drop them into the ‘Rows’, ‘Columns’, and ‘Values’ sections to populate the report. Another reason could be data thresholding, which occurs if your data sample is too small for the selected dimensions, to protect user privacy.

Q3: Can I save and share my Free-Form explorations?

Yes. Once you’ve created an exploration, you can rename it for clarity. It will be saved automatically in your ‘Explore’ hub. You can also share a read-only link with other users who have access to the same GA4 property by clicking the share icon in the top right. If users wish to utilise the report further, they can choose to duplicate it.

Kyle

Author

Hello, I'm Kyle Rushton McGregor!

I’m an experienced GA4 Specialist with a demonstrated history of working with Google Tag Manager and Looker Studio. I’m an international speaker who has trained 1000s of people on all things analytics.

Find out more About me
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