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.
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.
Attribution
Attribution is how you choose to give credit the channels that drive conversions on your site. I’m not going to go into great detail here, but…
You can choose between data-driven and last click attribution.
Data-driven uses machine learning to try to understand how different touch points impact conversions. However, data-driven is only used in minimal reports inside GA4. If you really want to focus on data-driven attribution, you will need to consider creating some custom reporting.
One nice change on last click attribution is that it ignores the Direct channel.
So if someone comes to your site from a Google Ad, doesn’t convert on that visit, but later comes back by typing the domain name back into their browser and does convert on that visit, instead of the Direct channel receiving credit for the conversion, it should be attributed to Paid Search instead.
No Goals
Speaking of conversions, in Google Analytics 4, there are no goals. There are only conversions.
