Free-Form Exploration

Free-Form is the default exploration technique that lets you build a custom table, bar chart, line chart, scatter, or geo map from any combination of dimensions and metrics.

You drag dimensions into rows and columns, metrics into values, and pick a visualization. You can nest dimensions, add filters, apply up to four segments as columns, and sort or cap the rows. It is the closest thing GA4 has to a pivot table, and most of your ad-hoc analysis will start here rather than in the specialized techniques.

You want channel performance split by device. You set session default channel group as the row, device category as a nested dimension, and sessions plus key events as values. One table shows you that paid social converts on desktop but not mobile, which no standard report puts side by side.

Free-form will happily show you high-cardinality dimensions bucketed into "(other)". When a dimension like page path or item name has more unique values than the row cap allows, GA4 lumps the overflow into a single "(other)" row, and your long tail disappears into it. Watch for that row before you trust a ranking. Reduce the date range or filter down to keep detail.

Your pivot table for everything GA4 refuses to prebuild.