Overview
Insights is the reporting layer for executives and marketers who need answers without writing SQL. Every view is built on top of the same GA4 event data your exports already produce, queried through Athena and cached in DynamoDB with a 15-minute default TTL so page loads stay fast.
The module is opinionated. Instead of a blank canvas, you get a prioritized feed of findings and a set of focused analyses, each answering a specific question: which sources drive revenue, which landing pages engage users, which promotions moved the needle. You don't assemble the report; you read the one that matches your question.
The Insights sidebar
Open Insights from the left sidebar. The navigation has five sections:
- Overview — the insights feed, your landing page. It surfaces prioritized findings as cards.
- Timeline — a chronological view of events across the property.
- Initiatives — tracked improvement projects spun off from findings.
- Reports — on-demand deep-dive analyses you queue and run. Its sub-menu links straight to Conversion Funnel Analysis, Revenue Attribution, Customer Journey Analysis, and Traffic Quality Analysis.
- Explorer — ad-hoc exploration for questions the prebuilt Reports don't cover.
Start with the Overview feed
Overview presents prioritized insight cards, each flagged as critical, opportunity, warning, or info, with a finding and a recommendation. Click View Details on any card to open the matching analysis page.
Those detail pages include Ops Health (technical and error-rate issues), Campaign Performance Analysis, Traffic Source Analysis, User Friction Analysis (rage clicks, mobile friction), and Promotion Effectiveness Analysis. You reach them through the feed rather than as standalone sidebar entries, so the feed stays the front door to detailed analysis.
Run a Report
Open Reports to see queue status and the Available Reports catalog. You can queue any of these on-demand analyses:
- Conversion Funnel Analysis — landing-page-to-purchase funnel with drop-off points.
- Revenue Attribution — which channels and touchpoints drive revenue, with multi-touch models.
- Customer Journey Analysis — full journeys from first touch to conversion, with path analysis.
- Customer Journey Flow — a simpler, focused view of bottlenecks and drop-off points.
- Traffic Quality Analysis — traffic quality by source using engagement metrics.
Each catalog card shows its data sources, frequency, and estimated runtime. Reports run in the background; the Queue Status cards and Recent Reports table track queued, processing, completed, and failed runs. When a report finishes, click it in the table (or use the Reports sub-menu) to open the rendered analysis with KPI tiles, data tables, and ECharts visualizations.
Track follow-up in Initiatives
When a finding turns into action, Initiatives tracks it as a project with Active, Pending, and Completed states. Each initiative records the original insight that prompted it and the live performance metrics measured since the work began, so you can tell whether the fix actually moved the number.
Reading the data
Views render KPI tiles with trend arrows, sortable data tables, and ECharts visualizations. All data is real; nothing is demo data. If a KPI shows zero, that's the actual zero in your data, not a placeholder.
Results come from the DynamoDB cache, which uses a 15-minute default TTL. After a cache miss, Athena runs the underlying query, stores the result, and serves cached responses for the next 15 minutes before rerunning. The first load after a quiet period may be slower; subsequent loads are near-instant.
Period-over-period deltas color-code direction: green for improvement, red for decline. For metrics where lower is better (like bounce rate), the coloring inverts so green still means "good news".
Start in the Overview feed and follow the prioritized cards into their detail pages rather than hunting for reports by name. Reports are on-demand and run in the background, so queue what you need and check the Recent Reports table for progress; failed runs can be retried from the same table. Use Explorer when the prebuilt Reports don't cover the question you need to answer.
Troubleshooting
A view shows no data for a recent date range
GA4 export lag can be several hours. For today and yesterday, expect partial or missing data; full data typically lands within 48 hours of the event. If a date range older than that shows nothing, check that the property has a GA4 export configured and the Insights data source is connected.
KPI numbers don't match GA4 directly
Insights queries the GA4 raw event export, not GA4's UI reports. Minor differences are expected because GA4's UI applies its own sampling, dedup rules, and session attribution; the raw export gives you the source data before those transformations. If the difference is large (more than a few percent), check the date range timezone handling, and verify the view's filters aren't excluding data you're counting in GA4.
A report is stuck or failed
Reports run in the background, so a long-running analysis stays in Processing until it completes. The Recent Reports table shows status and runtime; if a run lands in Failed, use the retry action on that row to requeue it. Estimated runtimes are shown on each Available Reports card so you know roughly how long to wait.
First load is slow, then fast on refresh
That's the 15-minute DynamoDB cache. The first load runs Athena live, which takes several seconds depending on date range. Subsequent loads within 15 minutes hit cache and return in under a second. If you need to explore freely rather than wait on a cached prebuilt view, Explorer is the better fit.