Browse our GA4-specific content or check out the full, 1-hour GA4 beginner’s tutorial here.
The session_start event is one of three automatically collected events in GA4. Google Analytics collects session_start every time a new session (a new visit) begins on your site. The event counts total sessions.
Not only can you use the session start event to keep tabs on your total site visits, but you can use the event to create segments and audiences from your users.
The Google Analytics source medium traffic dimension is one way to analyze your website traffic. The source tells you the specific “place” the traffic came from. The medium tells you about the “type” of traffic. Put them together and you have source / medium.
Google Signals provide enhanced functionality in Google Analytics. It also presents some potential downsides that marketers should understand.
Here’s the information you need.
Automatically collected events are the foundation of GA4 event tracking. Unlike other events, there is nothing you need to do to set them up. They are collected – you guessed it – automatically.
Let’s review the three automatically collected events and how you can use them in your analysis.
Microsoft has its own digital analytics tool called Clarity. But it serves a different purpose than Google Analytics. You’ll learn all about it in this comparison of Microsoft Clarity vs. Google Analytics.
Let’s do it!
Updated: 8/8/23 When it comes to Google Analytics views, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that technically Views no longer exist in GA4. The good news, however, is that we can use report filters to replicate much of the same functionality that we liked about views from the days of Universal Analytics.
The user engagement metric in GA4 is a new change to Google Analytics relative to the days of Universal Analytics. It is both used to log time (using engagement_time_msec event parameter) and it’s an event that you will see in your GA4 reports. It’s a foundational metric that has direct implications for calculated metrics like engagement rate, bounce rate, and more.
In this guide you’ll learn about GA4 user engagement and how to better understand your Google Analytics 4 reports.
If you are looking for Google Analytics search terms you are looking for one of two things. If you’re looking for searches that took place on your website, you need to use the view_search_results enhanced measurement event. If you’re looking for what specific search terms your visitors typed into Google before they found your website, you need to link Google Search Console with GA4.
The good news is that either is a pretty quick process. You should be able to complete it in 4 minutes or less.
UPDATED: 8/11/23 Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is now the only option for collecting data with Google Analytics. But there are problems with GA4, at least for those of us who used and loved Universal Analytics (UA). In this author’s opinion, the new platform is still not yet as good as UA was. Let’s review 4 common GA4 problems and explore what options we have.
Are you trying to see what page a visitor was on before they arrived on another specific page? Good news! You can use the referrer dimension to see data about the previous page in Google Analytics 4. Here’s what you need to know about page referrer in GA4.
