GA4 has been the only option since July 2023, when Universal Analytics stopped processing data.
That’s over three years to get used to it, but most people still haven’t.
We hear the same thing on client calls, almost word for word:
“I used to be able to have a quick look at key stats. Now I don’t know where anything is.” — Everyone
It’s not you, it’s GA4. Universal Analytics was basically a dashboard: open it up and there’s your traffic, your top pages, sorted for you, while GA4 gives you a report builder. It’s more powerful for an analyst but less user-friendly for someone quickly checking the site performance over coffee.
What actually got harder
Three things come up more than anything else when clients describe what they miss:
The at-a-glance view is gone
What used to sit on one home screen in UA is now spread across reports, explorations, and a search bar you need to know how to use to get anywhere.
Most visited pages
The data’s still there under Engagement > Pages and screens, but it’s two or three clicks in, and the default view rarely shows what people actually want to see first.
Where traffic is coming from
Source and medium reporting exists in GA4, but the platform now defaults to data-driven attribution, splitting credit across touchpoints instead of crediting one channel outright. So the numbers don’t always match what people remember from UA, and the report itself takes longer to find.
None of this means GA4 is broken. It’s built for people who live in analytics, not founders, solo marketers or small in-house teams checking the numbers once a week between everything else they’re running. What they need isn’t more data; it’s less friction getting to the bit they actually check.
What we built
Turns out we weren’t immune to any of this either. We hit the same wall with our own GA4 data, so we built an AI-powered platform that pulls in the data and hands back that quick, weekly glance, no GA4 report builder required.
It’s in early access. We’ve started rolling it out to our Timebank clients first, installing the plugin directly on their site so it’s dialled in properly from day one. Not on Timebank? That’s fine, just let us know, and we’ll help you with setting it up.
How it works
The core of it is a chat interface. Instead of learning GA4’s report builder, you ask for what you want in plain English:
“What were my top pages this month?”
“Where’s my traffic coming from?”
“How does this month compare to last month?”
The AI reads the question, pulls the answer straight from your GA4 data, and hands it back as a clean, readable view. No menus, no exploration builder, no guessing which report has the number you’re after.
The chat interface itself isn’t our first. We built one for our website back in December, helping visitors get quick answers about what we do without digging through pages to find them. This is a new build using what we learned from that one, pointed at GA4 data instead of general questions about our services.
From there, three things happen:
Save it
Any question you ask becomes a recurring query you can rerun without asking it again.
Build a dashboard
Pull your saved queries together into a single screen: the at-a-glance view GA4 took away, rebuilt around what you actually want to see.
Get it sent to you
Turn a dashboard into an automated report on whatever schedule suits you, so the data comes to your inbox instead of you having to go and find it.
It also comes with tracking links, a new piece built alongside it. They show you how many times a link’s been clicked, and you can set up a goal against one to track conversions too, all in the same dashboard as everything else, rather than living in a separate spreadsheet you have to cross-reference by hand.
Our goal is to let time-poor people get a quick read on how their site, content, and campaigns are performing, not to replace GA4. If you’re using it and there’s a feature you desperately need, let us know, but we’re keen to keep it simple and high-level.
Get it on your site
We are currently rolling it out to Timebank customers. If you want the quick-glance view back, and you’d rather not spend another afternoon in GA4’s report builder to get it, let us know. We’re happy to get it installed elsewhere too.