GA4 Glossary of Terms: Everything You Need to Know

With the introduction of the next-generation Google Analytics comes a list of newly added terms. These up to date features of GA4 are dedicated to deeper insights into the data understanding and audience behavior.

Coping with the new metrics of GA4 can be complex at first. This blog is a complete guide to help you comprehend them and reinforce your marketing approach.

Let’s jump straight to those new terms that level up your digital marketing expertise.

Terms in Google Analytics 4

Bounce Rate Replaced by Engaged Sessions

The bounce rate in the previous version of GA indicates the number of visitors that leave the site too early without taking an action. In replacement of bounce rate, GA4 has featured the term named “Engagement sessions”. How does it differ from the bounce rate? Let’s check out.

Both collect user data in contrast to each other. The GA bounce rate captures the information about the users who leave the website without any interaction. On the other hand, The Engagement sessions in GA4 are focused on collecting engagement events such as a click or scroll.

A session is considered engaged if one of the below-mentioned conditions is met:

• The user stays on the site for more than 10 seconds.
• Navigated to more than one page.
• Indulged in at least one valuable conversion event. For example, form filling, sign up, purchase, add to cart, and others.

The total percentage of the engagement sessions is known as the “Engagement rate”.

Custom Audience
GA4 has enabled the feature to classify users into different categories. Google allows you to create a custom audience according to the preference of a business.

To exemplify, you can build a group audience on the basis of “purchases in the last 30 days”, “users who discarded the products in the cart” or other similar events.

Besides being free to create customized audience groups, GA4 suggests some invaluable audiences to be included in your marketing approach.

This feature provides a clear picture of the audience interested in your products and an opportunity to precisely discover the target audience.

Events

Another worthwhile term of GA4 is these events liable for demonstrating the interaction of users to your website or application.

Unlike Universal Analytics where every interaction was referred to as a “hit”, GA4 considered it as an event. These events are categorized as automatic events, recommended events, and custom events.

Reporting in GA4

The information or data from the website and applications are collected through the GA4 reporting system. Traffic monitoring, data investigation, user behavior, and activities are included in these reporting features.

Partial data is visible as soon as the Google Analytics 4 is set up while other data will need additional configuration setup.

The “Report” tab on the top left side gets you to the page displaying different metrics.

Overview Report concludes the information collected by the acquisition and engagement reports.

Detailed Report
A detailed version of information enables marketers to understand the deep insights into the collected data. E-commerce reports and event reports are two examples of this reporting type.

Customize Reports
An incredible feature that allows you to alter the reports and the data included in them according to your choice.

App Developer
Here is the collection of data associated with the application you integrated into Firebase. The information gathered is related to users’ actions and behavior.

Games reporting
This is a section that lets you have insights into gaming-specific information. Informed decisions can be strategized using the data based on user behavior.

Lifecycle
Another useful section that tracks the journey of the customers. From acquisition to the retention of users, this phase will cover everything.

Users
Information regarding age, interests, app versions, and other similar details about the users navigating through your website and application.

GA4 Exploration Reports

Check out behavior
These are the funnel reports representing the details about how a customer traveled through one of the funnel points of your website.

Google Ads Report
In this section, enhance your understanding of the performance of your implemented Google Ads. You will know the matrices related to every user who clicked on your ad.

Ads Keywords and Query Reports
The information in this section is related to the search terms that lead to more clicks on the website.

Landing page reports
Have insights into the pages of your websites with maximum traffic and highest performance. This report can be customized just as other customization options available in GA4.

Sales Performance Reports, Social behavior reports, shopping behavior reports, and social media traffic reports are some other terms used to describe different data collected in the reports.

Final Thoughts

The launch of this game-changer technology is tilted to improve the understanding of the target audience and implementation of the marketing approaches. Being a marketing professional, the terms described in this blog will keep you updated in this competitive era. After learning everything, you can easily begin your journey with this powerful tool and maximize your output.