Understanding the Pages and Screens Report

December 1, 2025
  • First Published: December 1, 2025
  • Last Modified: December 1, 2025

If you’ve come from the world of Universal Analytics, you’ve likely spent a fair bit of time hunting for the old “All Pages” report. It was the bread and butter of behavioural analysis—a simple list of what people looked at and for how long.

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), things look a little different. The “All Pages” report has evolved into the Pages and Screens report.

Why “Screens”? Because GA4 treats websites and mobile apps as part of the same ecosystem. “Pages” refers to your website, and “Screens” refers to the views within an app. Even if you don’t have an app, this is the report you’ll use to understand exactly what content your users are consuming.

Here is how to get the most out of it without getting a headache.

Table of Contents

Where to Find the Pages and Screens Report

 

Let’s not overcomplicate this. To access the data:

  1. Navigate to Reports.

  2. Expand the Life Cycle collection (or the relevant collection in your setup).

  3. Click on Engagement.

  4. Select Pages and Screens.

By default, this report shows you the “Page path and screen class”. In plain English, that’s just the URL slug (like /blog/marketing-tips) rather than the full web address.

Pages and Screens Report

Filtering Your Data: Search vs. Filter

You will often want to hone in on a specific section of your site, like your blog or a specific product category.

There are two ways to do this, and one is significantly more robust than the other.

1. The Search Box


You can type “blog” into the search bar above the table. This is a quick fix if you just want a glance. However, it’s not a permanent filter.

 

2. The Filter Button


For a more granular view, use the “Add filter” button at the top of the report.

  1. Click Add filter.
  2. Select Page path and screen class.
  3. Choose a match type (e.g., contains).
  4. Type your identifier (e.g., blog).

This isolates all pages containing that term.

Pro Tip: If you find yourself filtering for the same section repeatedly (like your blog), don’t waste time doing this every day. You can create a new report, apply this filter permanently, and save it as a “Blog Performance” report in your main navigation.

Filter section in pages report

Making Sense of the Metrics


The default metrics in GA4 can be a mix of “highly useful” and “vanity numbers.”

Here is what you should pay attention to in this report:

Average Engagement Time: This is the gold standard. It measures the average time your website was arguably “in focus” in the browser. It’s far more accurate than the old “Time on Page” metric because it only counts when the user is actually looking at the screen.

Views per Active User: This tells you how much content the average visitor consumes. A higher number suggests your internal linking strategy is working. Or it might suggest that users can’t find what they are looking for.

Key Events: These are your conversions. Seeing which specific pages drive the most key events is vital for attribution.

A Note on “Event Count”: You will see a column for Event Count. Honestly? I don’t find this particularly useful in this specific context. It aggregates every scroll, click, and view, which can muddy the water when you are just trying to judge content performance. Stick to Key Events instead.

Seeing the Full URL


One frustration many marketers have is that “Page Path” doesn’t show the domain.

If you are managing subdomains or just prefer seeing the full https://www.example.com/page, you need to tweak the report.

  1. Click the pencil icon (Customise report) in the top right.
  2. Click Dimensions.
  3. Add Page Location.
  4. Set it as the default if you prefer.
  5. Click Apply and then Save.

Now, your report will display the full URL, making it much easier to distinguish between similar pages across different subdomains.

What This Report Won’t Tell You


It is important to know the limitations here so you don’t waste time looking for data that isn’t there.

1. It is not an Attribution tool

This report shows you what people viewed, but it isn’t great for telling you where they came from originally. For that, you want the Traffic Acquisition report.

2. It is not a Landing Page report

If you want to see the first page a user landed on, this isn’t the place. Use the dedicated Landing Page report for that data.

3. It doesn’t show the “Flow”

If you want to see what a user did before or after viewing a specific page (e.g., Did they go from the pricing page to the contact page?), you need to use the Path Exploration tool in the “Explore” section of GA4.

Summary

The Pages and Screens report is your diagnostic tool.

It tells you which content is engaging users and which pages might need to be optimised.

Your Action Plan:

  1. Go to your Pages and Screens report today.
  2. Add the Page Location dimension so you can see your full URLs.
  3. Filter by your blog section and check the Average Engagement Time. Are people actually reading, or just skimming?

The data is there; you just need to ensure the setup works for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why do I see “Screens” if I only have a website?

A: GA4 uses a unified data model for both apps and web. If you don’t have an app, you can simply ignore the “screens” terminology—the data refers strictly to your web pages.

Q: Can I group my content in this report?

A: Yes. If you have set up Content Grouping in GA4 (which requires some tagging work), you can click the dropdown arrow on the first column and select “Content Group” to see performance by category rather than individual URL.

Q: How is “Views” different from “Sessions”?

A: “Views” counts every time a page loads or reloads. A single “Session” (visit) can contain multiple page views. High views with low sessions usually means highly engaged users exploring multiple pages.

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.

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