Question from Reddit user:
I have a website that fluctuates a lot in traffic and I need to be reactive, hence having an overview that tells me hour over hour the % of traffic that I’m gaingin or losing overall and per landing page it’s of vital importance.
I used to use the Acquisition report in Universal Analytics, where is something similar in GA4?
Or something that can reply the same analytical questions
I would need sessions and the various channels, direct, social, organic.
I’m looking into the “unassigned” traffic because I don’t understand it.
Do you know where I can find such report?
GA4 has two APIs, one of which is real-time, so the data exist, what seems harder to find is the UI for that.
Thx
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
You are correct that the GA4 interface makes finding a direct hour-over-hour trend line difficult because the standard “Reports” section aggregates data daily.
The solution is to use the built-in Realtime Report for immediate, current hour data, or create a custom Exploration Report using the Hour dimension for historical hourly trends.
However, for a powerful, custom trend line showing the hour-over-hour percentage change by channel and for investigating “unassigned” traffic efficiently, you must leverage the Google Analytics Data API to export the hourly data into a powerful visualization tool like Looker Studio.
The long answer is:
The reason you can’t find a direct hourly trend in the GA4 standard reports, unlike the old Acquisition report in Universal Analytics, is due to GA4’s focus on event-based data which is typically aggregated and processed daily for reporting stability.
To find a view that will give you the real-time, hour-by-hour fluctuation you need to be reactive, you should first look at the Realtime Report in the left navigation panel.
This report shows data for the last 30 minutes, which is helpful for immediately checking if a traffic surge or drop is happening right now.
While this report doesn’t provide historical hour-over-hour percentage change, it does show traffic by source and medium, which is a good quick check for your channel distribution.
For the historical hourly trend line you used to rely on, you need to create a Free Form Exploration in the “Explore” section.
In this Exploration, you can set the Rows to the Hour dimension and the Columns to the Session default channel grouping dimension, with the Values metric set to Sessions.
This will give you a table of sessions broken down by channel for every hour within your selected date range, and the visualization options, like a line chart, can then show the trends you need.
For the “unassigned” traffic you mentioned, this typically occurs when GA4 cannot determine the source of a session, often due to missing or non-standard UTM parameters.
The key is to filter the Exploration on the Session default channel grouping and look closely at those sessions to identify patterns in other dimensions like Page referrer.
However, to achieve the ultimate goal of a scalable, custom chart showing hour-over-hour percentage change for specific channels and landing pages, you need a custom data pipeline: Google Analytics Data API + Looker Studio API + BigQuery + Google Tag Manager + Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
This setup is an excellent solution because the Google Analytics Data API allows you to pull the raw, unsampled hourly data you need.
This data can then be automatically piped into a data warehouse like BigQuery, where you can use SQL to calculate the precise hour-over-hour percentage change, segment out individual landing pages, and even join the data with enriched server-side data collected via Google Tag Manager and a server-side tagging environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
This server-side setup is particularly powerful for fixing unassigned traffic because you can control and standardize the session_start event and attribution parameters before they ever hit GA4.
Finally, Looker Studio is then connected to BigQuery using the Looker Studio API or the native connector to visualize this clean, calculated data in a custom dashboard with exactly the trend lines and percentage change cards your business requires to be reactive.
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