The Scenario
You are a paid media director. The board deck is due Thursday. You need one table showing how organic, paid search, email, and direct channels compare on sessions, conversions, and revenue for Q1 2025 versus Q2 2025 — side by side, with a percentage change column.
You have already been through GA4's built-in Channel Groups report. It shows one period at a time. You can export Q1 as a CSV and Q2 as a CSV, but then you are aligning two flat files in a Google Sheet by hand, calculating the change columns yourself, and hoping the channel group names are spelled the same in both exports.
The bad version of preparing this table:
- Export Q1 channel group data from GA4, open CSV, paste into Sheet
- Export Q2 channel group data, paste beside Q1
- Realize GA4 exported "Paid Search" for Q1 and "Paid search" for Q2 — capitalization difference
- Manually reconcile the names, recalculate the change columns
- The revenue metric is missing from one export because you configured the Q1 report differently
- Re-export Q1 with revenue included, repaste
- The deck goes out with last-second numbers you are not fully confident in.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet that calls the GA4 API directly, so you do not need to export two CSVs and reconcile them.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
From my GA4 property, run a report comparing sessions, conversions, and revenue by default channel group for Q1 2025 vs Q2 2025. Write the results side-by-side in my Google Sheet with a column for each metric per quarter and a percentage change column for each metric. Start at A1 with headers.
SheetXAI runs two GA4 API calls, aligns the channel group names, computes the change columns, and writes the full comparison table into your sheet. Both date ranges, one query, one pass.
What You Get
A board-ready comparison table:
- Rows — one per default channel group (Organic Search, Paid Search, Email, Direct, and any others active in your property)
- Columns — Sessions Q1, Sessions Q2, Sessions Change %, Conversions Q1, Conversions Q2, Conversions Change %, Revenue Q1, Revenue Q2, Revenue Change %
- Aligned channel names — SheetXAI normalizes capitalization and formatting so Q1 and Q2 rows match
The change columns are calculated at write time. You do not add a formula layer on top — the numbers land in the sheet ready for a chart.
Want the table sorted by Q2 conversions descending so the highest-performing channel is at the top? Add that to the prompt. Want a summary row at the bottom showing totals? One more line.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Channel group attribution in GA4 has quirks. SheetXAI handles them inline.
When some channels show zero revenue
Your GA4 property does not have e-commerce tracking set up for all channels, so some rows show zero revenue even though those channels drove purchases.
Run the Q1 vs Q2 channel group comparison for sessions, conversions, and revenue. For any channel group where revenue is zero in both quarters, note "Revenue not tracked" in a Notes column instead of showing zeros. Write the table at A1.
When you want to add a custom grouping
Your organization counts both Paid Search and Display under "Paid Media" for reporting purposes. The standard GA4 channel groups do not reflect that.
Run the Q1 vs Q2 channel group comparison. After writing the raw table at A1, add a second summary table at A15 that combines Paid Search and Display into a single "Paid Media" row, summing sessions, conversions, and revenue for both quarters.
When only the top four channels matter
You have eight channel groups but the board only cares about the top four by Q2 conversions.
Run the Q1 vs Q2 channel group comparison. Filter to the four channel groups with the highest Q2 conversions. Write only those four rows into the sheet, with percentage change columns, sorted by Q2 conversions descending.
When you need the full picture plus a written summary
You want the table and a two-sentence narrative for the exec summary slide — both in one shot.
Run a Q1 vs Q2 comparison of sessions, conversions, and revenue by default channel group from my GA4 property. Write the table into A1. Calculate percentage change columns. Then write a two-sentence summary of the biggest mover and the biggest decline into cell A14 — something I can drop directly into the board deck exec summary.
The pattern: instead of building the table and then writing the narrative separately, you get both from the same prompt. The deck gets done before lunch.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull a Q1 vs Q2 channel breakdown from your GA4 property into your sheet. The Google Analytics integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to pull a full GA4 performance report or the Google Analytics in Google Sheets overview.