Jamie and the GA4 Dashboards of Doom

Since setting up my new website, I've been tinkering, tweaking, organising, reorganising, branding and generally mucking around with the thing to almost no end. Initially, it simply began with making sure I'd ported over my most collection of blog posts from the past few years, but that's now extended to trying to write more pieces, along with ensuring my professional experience is easily accessible, to bolting on my LinkedIn profile.

Next, I'll be linking to it from my CV, so that people can read the TL;DR stuff on one page and be met with a much better representation of me online. But before I actually promote this too hard, I wanted to give myself the satisfaction of being able to check engagement metrics. After all, a busy 2026 of pushing content on the world's best virtue signalling website is a waste of time if I can't prove it's having an effect.

Step forward GA4... or so I thought.

My excitement to get things hooked up, and the initial promise of the simplicity of setting up Google Analytics has been brought to a crashing halt because, put simply, it absolutely sucks.

Now don't get me wrong, the ease of setup is frankly ludicrous, and I'm sure for more well-developed, professional setups, it's incredible and "just works", but for somebody who simply wants to use it for some basic analysis, it is an absolute clutter bomb.

Where are the simplicities of GA3? I remember tracking events in Google Analytics 3 when I was Head of Data & AI at Optiseller. It wasn't exactly a doddle, but it wasn't far away. Tag Manager was a great wee supporting tool and measuring those tags - and then doing some actual statistics for a change - was too good to resist. I definitely began to love it. Even then, the dashboard wasn't terrific, but it was manageable for navigation.

Now, in GA4, there's a few tabs where you'll find some fun looking chart (hello massive grey world map, big fan), but why can't I just configure charts more easily? Why is it so rigid when the structure of Google Analytics has so much promise?! It's like you got to the far side of a really slick analytics tool and then thought, "nah, you know what, we want to make customising it away from our approach really awkward, so that whenever they try, it just makes them sad". Well done, objective achieved.

This is the same company that used to have the ever-celebrated "I'm feeling lucky" button.

What a fall from grace.

I do feel somewhat compelled to say again, I'm sure this is much better for somebody who is exclusively working in the realm of web traffic, SEO, marketing, etc, etc - but can't help but feel like they could've done better here.

Nightmare!