Google Analytics 4 (GA4) includes advanced AI capabilities to help you better understand and take action on your data. Ever since OpenAI dropped ChatGPT, AI has swiftly become one of the major buzzwords of the tech industry and we don’t see it going anywhere in the near future. 

However, it must be noted that AI and ML have been a part of Google products for a long time. In  this article, we’ll explore two key features that leverage AI: automated insights and custom insights.

Let’s begin:

Automated Insights in GA4

Automated insights use AI to continuously analyze your analytics data and surface important changes or emerging trends. These insights are generated automatically and surfaced on your GA4 property.

How Automated Insights Work

GA4 utilizes advanced statistical modeling and machine learning algorithms to monitor your data. When an unusual change or pattern is detected, an automated insight is triggered.

For example, GA4 may discover:

• A significant increase or decrease in a key metric like revenue, conversions, etc.
• Traffic from a new source growing rapidly
• A change in user behavior flow after a site update

These represent significant changes that likely warrant investigation. The automated insight notifies you straight within your GA4 reports.

Viewing Automated Insights

Automated insights primarily appear in two places in your GA4 property:

1. The insights page

This dedicated insights page shows all generated insights over time. It’s the central location to manage and interact with insights.

2. On relevant reports

Insights also surface contextually on dashboard reports related to the metric or dimension involved. For example, a revenue insight may appear on your ecommerce overview report.

This on-report placement allows easy access to insights while analyzing data.

Benefits of Automated Insights

Automated insights provide several key benefits:

• Surface changes you may miss - With huge amounts of data, it’s impossible to manually detect every significant shift. Automated insights catch what you otherwise may overlook.
• Alert you to issues - Sudden drops in critical metrics could signify problems. Insights bring these to your attention immediately.
• Prompt further analysis - Each insight links to related reports to allow digging deeper into what may have caused the change.
• Save time - No need to manually comb through reports. Insights deliver actionable information right to you.

Overall, automated insights help you stay on top of your analytics data and guide you to meaningful discoveries you can act on.

Custom Insights in GA4

While automated insights run continuously in the background, you can also create targeted custom insights. Custom insights let you define specific conditions to monitor for changes important to your business.

Creating a Custom Insight

Here are the steps to create an automated custom insight:

1. Choose a metric - The core metric to monitor like revenue, conversions, etc.
2. Set a condition - Conditions like an anomaly, is greater/less than threshold, or percent change. This defines the triggering logic.
3. Pick a schedule - How frequently the metric should be checked - hourly, daily, weekly, etc.
4. Specify alert contacts - Email address(es) to notify when the insight is triggered.

For example, you could create a daily insight on conversions that alerts you if conversions decrease by more than 10% day-over-day.

The condition would trigger an insight whenever that threshold is crossed.

Custom Insight Benefits

Custom insights provide further advantages:

• Monitor metrics important to you - Automated insights look at overall data patterns. With custom insights, you choose the specific metrics and conditions to focus on.
• Get notified of changes - Configure email alerts to be notified immediately when an insight triggers.
• Act quickly on issues - Real-time alerts allow quick reaction to problems or opportunities uncovered by an insight.
• Gain context - Insights appear on related reports, giving context to better understand the issue or change detected.

Overall, custom insights help you monitor your business-specific metrics and conditions to surface important changes as they happen.

Viewing Insights in GA4 Demo Account

Let's view insights in action within a GA4 demo account.

Navigating to the home page, we can scroll down to the “Insights & Recommendations” section.

This shows us a sample automated insight indicating organic search makes up 52.99% of conversion paths.

Clicking through explores a related report on conversion paths, letting us analyze further.

We can also provide feedback on the insight by “thumbs up/down” to improve recommendations.

This is how automated insights surface directly in relevant GA4 reports.

Creating a Custom Insight

Now let's walk through creating a custom insight.

Navigate to the insights page and click "+ New insight".

We can choose a suggested insight or create a custom insight.

Let's make an insight to detect a daily anomaly in conversions.

We configure:

• Metric: Conversions
• Condition: Has anomaly
• Frequency: Daily

This will alert us anytime a spike or dip happens in daily conversions.

We can also add email notifications and save the insight. It will now start monitoring our data based on the conditions set.

Wrap Up

Key takeaways:

• Automated insights continuously monitor your GA4 data and surface meaningful changes in reports.
• Custom insights allow configuring conditions and metrics specific to your business to detect significant changes.
• Insights help you quickly identify and understand changes in your data to guide smarter decision making.

Focus on leveraging insights in GA4 to:

• Spot potential issues faster
• Identify optimization opportunities
• Drive deeper analysis on metric impacts

Consistently reviewing and acting on insights will lead to greater positive business outcomes over time.

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