I’m looking to build some custom reports in GA4, to monitor the onboarding process, but as Im a fairly new user to GA, and just learning now with guides etc, I seem to run into a dead end now. What I want to do is to understand at what stages users churn from the process, by tracking the number of them at each of the steps.

But now I have troubles to actually consume the data in GA4 / Explore > Free Form

What I did is building a dataLayer entry onboarding_step on the onboarding pages, which output the value as 1 2 5 etc representing the given step.

Then in GTM I defined the onboarding_step variable, built a Page View trigger which fires up when dataLayer onboarding_step value is greater than or equal to 1

Created a GA4 event tag – with a name of Onboarding_Step_Tracking + event parameter to pass Onboarding_Step with the value {{Data layer - onboarding_step}}

This step seems to work correctly, if I’ll go to Event tracking report in GA4 I could see that there are some users on given steps (screenshot) – but as this report doesnt give me all the info I’d want (last 30min etc), I’ve proceeded to build a report via Explore > Free Form

In GA4 I proceeded to create a custom definition of Onboarding Tracking with the Scope Event and Event parameter Onboarding_step so the one I pass within the GA4 Tag in GTM.

What I want to achieve is a table like this:

with onboarding_step value being the value from the GTM variable Onboarding_step for example 1 meaning the 1st step of the onboarding.

So for the Segment I’m using the users Onboarding_Step_Tracking – my GA4 event in GTM
For Dimensions I’m using the default Device category, and put it to columns – no issues
and I import my custom definition of Onboarding Tracking that I defined in GA4 – and put it to rows, basically nothing happens – so guess this is my main issue, that I’m unsure how to debug.
For Values I’m using a default metric of Total users – no issues at it seems.

So basically my issue is how to import the value of the onboarding_step dataLayer input into the free form