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A few things you should know about GA4
I shared this with my email list last week and figured I would share it here too.
Sunset is upon us. Buckle up and get ready for the day we have all been dreading.
If you are sticking with GA4 and have not moved on to another tool, here are a few things you should know and will find helpful.
**Sessions**
Sessions are visits to your site. They timeout after 30 minutes of inactivity. Unlike in Universal Analytics, sessions can contain multiple traffic sources. In UA, visiting a site from another traffic source would trigger a new session.
For example, if a visitor comes to your site from a Facebook ad, are then sent through Google to login, and then redirected back to your site, this would be one session, but with multiple traffic sources.
In Universal Analytics, this triggers a second session from [Google.com](https://Google.com).
**Engaged Sessions**
Engaged Sessions is a new metric. An engaged session is any session that:
* lasts longer than 10 seconds
* or includes 2 or more page views
* or has at least one conversion**Engagement Rate**
Engagement Rate is the number of engaged sessions divided by the total number of sessions.Example: If you had 1000 sessions and 840 of them were engaged, your engagement rate would be 84%.
**Bounce Rate**
Originally bounce rate was excluded from GA4, but it has made a return, however it is different from how it is measured in UA.
In GA4, bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. Using the example above, the bounce rate for that scenario would be 16%.
Remember that one of the criteria that can trigger an engaged session is a session that lasts at least 10 seconds.
Depending on the type of site you have, you can expect to see very high engagement rates on most pages. This is going to have a drastic impact on bounce rate.
In UA, a bounce was triggered by a single page view and exit. Many of the visits that were recorded as a bounce in UA probably did last longer than 10 seconds.
In other words, if you do track bounce rate and care about it, you may see a drastic drop in bounce rates in GA4 compared to UA.
It doesn’t mean visitors are engaging with your content more than they were before. It’s just a much different measuring stick being used.
**Users**
Users in GA4 only includes users that had an engaged session. This is different from UA.Total Users in GA4 is a closer match to what was defined as users in UA.
**Average Engagement Time**
Average engagement time replaces the average time on site metric from Universal Analytics.
This is one area where GA4 probably does deserve some kudos. It does a much better job of measuring engagement time.Universal Analytics did not really measure the average time a visitor spent on your site. It only measured the time between when sessions were triggered.
So bounced sessions in Universal Analytics used to have a zero second time on site because no second session would ever be triggered.
Someone could spend 10 minutes reading an article and then leave the site. That would still show as zero seconds on the site.
**No Goals**
Speaking of conversions, in Google Analytics 4, there are no goals. There are only conversions.
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Video goes out tomorrow about how to track form submissions in GA4 with Google Tag Manager.
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1 Reply
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This is the most useful post I have seen here in a while.
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great stuff..props for the post ????
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What are the alternatives? I’m so tired of messing with this stuff.
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Thank you. Can you also suggest some content where we can read / watch more about GA4 from a marketing perspective?
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Excellent write-up!
Could you double check a few things for me?
> Engaged Sessions is a new metric. An engaged session is any session that:
• lasts longer than 10 seconds
• or includes 2 or more page views
• or scrolls to the bottom of the page
• or has at least one conversionDo scroll events actually trigger Engaged Sessions if they are not set up as conversions? The documentation does not seem to state that.
> Users in GA4 only includes users that had an engaged session. This is different from UA.Total Users in GA4 is a closer match to what was defined as users in UA.
I believe Users (or Active Users, as it is called in the custom report dimensions) includes not only users with engaged sessions but also users who visited for the first time (i.e. triggered a first open or first visit)
Please do let me know if you happen upon any documentation that contradicts this! I’m doing a lot of GA4 training lately and I don’t want to be spreading wrong or outdated info.
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Great post nice breather from all the chat-gpt crap on here ????
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I haven’t used Google Analytics n a long time and I’m just starting to get back into SEO. What happens if I don’t take action not GA4? Will I be transitioned over to it automatically? I don’t quite get why this is happening and what it is I need to do. It all seems rather long winded.
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Just ranting a bit.
GA4 is absolute trash. It fails to answer basic questions marketers ask about their website in a user friendly, intuitive and effective way. It fails as a reporting tool due to its complexity, and it fails as an exploratory data analysis tool due to its shortcomings.
Some key points:
* No way to group dates by weeks, months or years. Goodbye analysing conversion rates over time easily. Mind boggling.
* The line chart at the top of reports aren’t stacked, so seeing trends over time is impossible.
* The visualization next to the line chart is in 100% of cases absolutely useless.
* The “overview” reports give jack shit useful information except for a number of events in isolation, which is pretty much useless for any serious analysis.
* Drilling down on events across parameters requires you to go into the explorer view (which is pretty technically challenging, and requires soo many clicks to make something).
* Not being able to select just one specific conversion in the explorer and having to rely on filters that filter all of the other events in the report away has made me go back to calculating numbers in a fucking excel spreadsheet.And to top it off they took the second biggest corporate dump of my career by adding absurd quotas to the GA4 API in August. Which broke all my Data Studio reports I’d spent hours creating to get around all of these basic usability issues in the UI for my clients. Thank you very fucking much Google, how do I explain that thousands of dollars of consulting hours isn’t usable without spending 3 times as much time migrating everything to BigQuery?
It’s not you that’s struggling to learn GA4. It’s GA4 that is terribly designed.
Tips for tools: Piwik Pro is great if you’re a small website and use it for free or have the budgets to pay for enterprise software.
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>If you are sticking with GA4 and have not moved on to another tool
Ok, another tool… Are there any worthy GA alternatives?
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please post that video here tomorrow. thanks!
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