Unlike Universal, GA4 has no direct way to save the customization you make to a standard report.
I mean things as basic as adding a comparison, a secondary dimension, or sorting a table by a specific metric:
If you're like me and have daily reporting in your GA4 project, going through the same damn steps every single day can drive you up the wall. Especially with reports that return several hundred rows, since the tool takes longer to render them.
Well, here's something you may not have realized yet: the report URL contains (almost) all the customization we've made.
That means that if I edit and customize a report today, I generate a URL. If I reload that same URL tomorrow, the data will update and the customization will remain intact:
Knowing this, you have two solutions, both based on the same principle: storing the URL.
Better solution: save the URL as a browser bookmark
Simply add it as you would any bookmark : give it a specific name and (better still) create a dedicated folder:
This way, you create as many bookmarks as reports you review daily in the tool.
If you've created the folder, you'll have everything organized and one click away on any PC you log into.
Not-so-good solution: use a browser dedicated to your daily reporting
If you can't be bothered to add every bookmark, or you have too many similar reports, you can always dedicate a browser exclusively to GA4 and keep the different reports you review every day open in separate tabs:
That way, every time you open the browser, each report will reload with updated data.
Actually, you don't need a whole browser; you can just dedicate a specific user profile in a browser to it.
It's a worse solution, but it's the one I started using in Universal and, when I migrated to GA4, I kept it out of habit.
It's worse because, if you use several PCs like I do (office and laptop), you have to rely on account and history syncing every time you make a change to your reporting.
Also, sometimes the page doesn't reload correctly and GA4 shows an error message, so you have to hit “back” in the browser to return to the report page.
So I'd recommend starting with the other option, although this one is still much, much better than applying the same changes every day.
Extending the trick
To wrap up, a couple of notes:
Reusing a report across different projects
If you want to use the same report in several projects, you only need to change the property ID in the URL.
It's the parameter that starts with /p. For example /p365189818/:
Sharing a report
If you need other users to see the report, you can save it as a new report:
It will be available in the library, so you can add it to whichever report group you want:
If you didn't know this trick, I hope you start using it right away, because it can shave several minutes (quite a few, depending on the scale) off your daily reporting.
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