Update: This post was originally written and published in 2020, since then Universal Analytics (UA) was retired by Google on 1 July 2023, and all historical UA data was permanently deleted on 1 July 2024. This article has been fully rewritten for Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Google Analytics has become a core tool for most digital marketers. W3 Tech’s data shows that it is on more than 44% of all websites (a drop from 56% when we originally wrote this post in 2020). In raw numbers, that’s more than 31 million websites, which makes sense considering just how important tracking success has become in the marketing space across industries.
With the move to Google Analytics 4, the platform has been fundamentally rebuilt from the ground up. Rather than the session and pageview model of Universal Analytics, GA4 uses an event based data model that tracks every user interaction as an event, giving you a much richer and more flexible picture of how people use your website or app.
The beauty of GA4 is that you don’t have to be a data expert to get value from it, but many find it to be less easy to navigate and less user friendly than Universal Analytics.
To make the most out of the data it collects you do need to know which metrics matter and where to find them. Many of the familiar Universal Analytics metrics have changed names, been redefined, or been replaced with better alternatives.
With a bit of training and a few tutorials, you can set up exploration reports that help you gain valuable insights into your audience, their journey through the sales funnel, and their behaviour as they navigate through your website.
In this post we’ll look at the 15 most important metrics to monitor in GA4, what they mean, and why they matter.
What Google Analytics Can Teach You About Your Audience
Any marketer can benefit from audience insights. The better you know the people who actually read your content and could become customers, the more you can adjust to their needs and convince them to follow through.
GA4’s Reports section, specifically the Acquisition and Engagement reports, give you a detailed picture of who your users are, where they’re coming from, and how they behave. Here are the five core audience-level metrics to monitor regularly.
1) Users (Active Users)
In GA4, the primary ‘Users’ metric refers to Active Users. This is people who had at least one engaged session on your site in the selected time period. This is a meaningful change from Universal Analytics, which reported Total Users (everyone who triggered any event, however briefly).
Active Users is a more honest measure of your real audience, because it filters out people who arrived and immediately left without any meaningful interaction. You’ll find this metric throughout GA4’s standard reports.
Where to find it: Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition or User Acquisition.
2) Sessions
A session in GA4 is a period of user interaction with your website, starting when a user arrives and ending after 30 minutes of inactivity. One user can generate multiple sessions. Total Sessions gives you a measure of overall site activity and is useful for spotting traffic trends and the impact of marketing campaigns.
Note that GA4 counts sessions slightly differently to Universal Analytics. In particular, sessions no longer reset at midnight, which can cause minor discrepancies if you’re comparing historical data.
Where to find it: Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition.
3) New Users
New Users are people visiting your website for the first time (identified by GA4 not finding a previous cookie or identifier for them). Monitoring new users helps you gauge your reach and brand awareness, and how successfully your marketing efforts are bringing fresh audiences to your site.
GA4 separates User Acquisition (how new users found you for the very first time) from Traffic Acquisition (where all sessions originate, including returning visitors). Both views are valuable and serve different analytical purposes.
Where to find it: Reports > Acquisition > User Acquisition.
4) Engagement Rate
Engagement Rate is one of GA4’s most important new metrics, and a direct replacement for the old Bounce Rate as the primary engagement indicator. It measures the percentage of sessions that were ‘engaged’, defined by Google as sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, included at least two pageviews, or resulted in a conversion event.
An engagement rate of 60–75% is generally considered strong across most industries. A low engagement rate is a signal worth investigating, as it may point to slow page load times, misleading ad copy that doesn’t match landing page content, or content that simply isn’t resonating with visitors.
Where to find it: Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition (add as metric via customisation).
5) Average Engagement Time
This metric measures the average time users spend actively engaged with your site, in particular, the time your web page was in the foreground of a user’s browser and being actively viewed. This is a more accurate measure than the old ‘Average Session Duration’ in Universal Analytics, which counted any open tab regardless of whether the user was actually looking at it.
Longer average engagement times generally indicate content that holds attention. If certain pages have very low engagement times, it’s worth reviewing whether the content is delivering what visitors expected.
Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens.
How GA4 Helps You Understand Where Your Visitors Come From
The Acquisition reports in GA4 help you understand how users arrive at your website, so you can evaluate which marketing channels and campaigns are performing or underperforming. GA4 offers two distinct acquisition lenses – User Acquisition (first touch) and Traffic Acquisition (session-level).
Here are the five key metrics and dimensions to focus on.
6) Traffic Channels
The Traffic Acquisition report breaks down your sessions by channel, using the ‘Session Default Channel Grouping’ dimension. The standard channels in GA4 include:
- Organic Search – Visitors arriving from organic search engine results.
- Direct – Users who typed your URL directly or whose source could not be identified.
- Organic Social – Traffic from organic social media posts.
- Paid Search – Visitors from paid search ads.
- Referral – Visitors arriving via links on other websites.
- Email – Traffic from email campaigns (requires UTM tagging, often automated by ESP and marketing automation tools).
- Paid Social – Traffic from paid social media advertising.
- Unassigned – Traffic that doesn’t match Google’s predefined channel rules, often due to improper UTM tagging, missing parameters, or technical issues like improper cross-domain tracking.
- Organic Shopping – Traffic from organic product listings on platforms like Google Shopping, Amazon, and eBay.
- Cross-network – Traffic from Google Ads campaigns that span multiple networks, such as Performance Max and Smart Shopping campaigns.
Understanding your channel mix helps you avoid over-reliance on any single traffic source. It also guides decisions around a website redesign, for example, if you have significant referral traffic, you’ll need to ensure important URLs are preserved or properly redirected.
To get the most out of this report, use UTM parameters in your marketing campaigns to help you identify specific campaigns. Without them, GA4 cannot always accurately attribute traffic and it may fall into the ‘Unassigned’ or ‘Direct’ categories, obscuring your true channel performance.
Where to find it: Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition.
7) User Acquisition vs Traffic Acquisition
This is a distinction unique to GA4 that’s worth understanding.
User Acquisition focuses on how new users found your site for the very first time (useful for evaluating campaigns targeting fresh audiences.)
Traffic Acquisition covers all sessions, including returning visitors (useful for evaluating overall marketing performance and repeat engagement.)
For a comprehensive view of all traffic, Traffic Acquisition is usually the go-to report. For evaluating new customer acquisition specifically, use the User Acquisition report.
Where to find it: Reports > Acquisition > User Acquisition/Traffic Acquisition.
8) Device and Technology
GA4’s Tech reports show you what devices, browsers, and operating systems your visitors use. This data is invaluable when planning a website redesign or investigating usability issues.
A large proportion of mobile users, for instance, reinforces the case for responsive design and fast mobile page load times. A significant share of users on a specific browser may flag compatibility issues to test for.
Where to find it: Reports > Tech > Tech Overview.
9) Conversions (Key Events)
In GA4, conversions are now called ‘Key Events’. These are specific events you mark as important within your GA4 property. You define these yourself based on your business objectives. Common examples include form submissions, phone click-throughs, purchases, file downloads, or reaching a specific page such as a ‘Thank You’ page.
GA4 tracks all user interactions as events by default (including page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, and video plays), and you simply mark the ones that matter most to your business as Key Events. Some require minimal set up within the admin ‘events’ area, whilst more custom events may need creating using something like Tag Manager, then you can add them or mark them as Key Events.
This is a significant improvement over Universal Analytics, which required more complex manual setup for goal tracking.
Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Conversions, or Admin > Events to configure.
10) Session Key Event Rate
Once you’ve configured your Key Events, the Session Key Event Rate tells you what percentage of sessions resulted in a conversion. This metric lets you connect channel or campaign performance directly to business outcomes.
You might find, for instance, that organic search sessions have a much higher key event rate than direct traffic, helping you prioritise SEO investment.
You can also assign a monetary value to key events to calculate the estimated return on your marketing activity, particularly useful for lead generation businesses where a lead has a known average value. In an eCommerce setup you should be pulling through purchase data.
Where to find it: Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition (add as metric).
How to Understand User Behaviour Through Google Analytics
GA4’s Engagement reports give you page-level and content-level insight into how users interact with your site once they arrive.
Here are five key metrics to monitor:
11) Views
In GA4, ‘Views’ replaces the old ‘Pageviews’ metric. It counts the total number of times a page or screen was displayed, including repeated views by the same user. This gives you a raw measure of the popularity of individual pages and helps you understand which content is drawing the most attention.
Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens.
12) Views per Session
This metric shows how many pages, on average, users view per session. A higher figure generally indicates that visitors are finding your content engaging enough to explore further. Low views per session on key landing pages may indicate that visitors aren’t finding the natural next steps they need, or that internal linking and calls-to-action need strengthening.
Where to find it: Calculated from Views and Sessions in Explore > Free Form.
13) Scroll Depth
Scroll depth tells you how far down each page your visitors actually scroll — and it’s one of the most practically useful signals GA4 tracks automatically. When Enhanced Measurement is enabled in GA4, a scroll event fires whenever a user reaches approximately 90% of a page’s vertical depth. No additional setup is needed for this baseline tracking.
GA4 tracks scrolls at the individual page level, so you can see unique user scrolls per page and calculate a scroll rate (the percentage of active users who scrolled to the bottom) as a comparison metric across pages with different traffic levels.
A page with high traffic but a low scroll rate is a clear signal that something is losing visitors partway through, whether that’s content that doesn’t deliver on its promise, pages that are too long, or key calls-to-action buried below where most people stop reading.
Conversely, a high scroll rate on a lower-traffic page is a strong indicator of content worth promoting further.
If visitors aren’t reaching your calls-to-action, they can’t convert, so scroll depth data lets you identify those drop-off points and experiment with moving important content higher on the page.
Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Events > Scroll (requires Enhanced Measurement to be enabled in Admin > Data Streams).
14) Landing Pages
The Landing Pages report shows which pages users first arrive on when they visit your site. These pages are the critical first impression of your brand for many visitors. If they don’t immediately communicate what your business does and why visitors should stay, you’ll lose them quickly.
Review your top landing pages alongside their engagement rates. If a high-traffic landing page has a low engagement rate, that’s a clear signal that something about the page isn’t meeting visitor expectations, whether that’s the content, the page speed, or a mismatch between the ad or link that brought them there and what they find on arrival.
Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Landing Page.
15) Events
Because GA4 is built on an event-based model, the Events report gives you a rich view of everything users do on your site, not just the pages they view. GA4 automatically tracks scroll depth, outbound link clicks, file downloads, video engagement, purchases, and site search out of the box, without requiring additional configuration.
This is one of GA4’s biggest practical advantages over Universal Analytics. Reviewing your top events regularly helps you understand which content formats and interactive elements are resonating, where users are dropping off, and what actions are driving (or not driving) conversions.
Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Events.
A Note on Exploring Your Data
One of GA4’s most powerful features is the Explore section, which lets you build custom reports and analyses beyond what’s available in the standard reports. Funnel exploration, path analysis, segment overlap, and free-form tables are all available here. For most businesses, this is where the most actionable insights live once you’ve got comfortable with the standard metrics above.
If you’re looking to understand a specific conversion path, investigate why traffic from a particular channel isn’t converting, or analyse how users move through your site, the Explore section is where to start.
Are You Ready to Leverage Google Analytics for Better Digital Marketing?
We’re just scratching the surface. GA4 is a more powerful platform than Universal Analytics, but it takes some familiarity to get the most out of it. The 15 metrics above give you a solid foundation, covering who your visitors are, where they come from, what they do, and whether they’re converting.
Keep an eye on these, and you’ll gain valuable insight to improve your web presence over time and grow your business.
The key principle in GA4, as in any analytics platform, is to look beyond vanity metrics like raw traffic numbers and focus on the metrics that connect to real business outcomes, like engagement, conversions, and revenue.
If you’re like most businesses, you’re probably already gathering the data. The question is what you should do with it. What improvements could your website make to improve user experience or convert more traffic to customers?
Impact Media can help with GA4 configuration, conversion tracking, and analytics reviews to ensure everything is working right on your WordPress website. Get in touch to discuss your requirements.
