A complete guide to users in Google Analytics 4

When you pull up the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) homepage, you quickly notice its focus on ‘users’. The very first report available in the dashboard highlights how many people have visited your website in a particular period, how many stopped by in the last 30 minutes, and where they came from. 

As you’d expect, in GA4, a user is someone who accesses your website or app. The tool identifies 4 main user groups: active users, total users, new users, and returning users. 

This article will help you understand what these user metrics mean, where to find them, and how to understand the behavior behind the numbers by supplementing your analytics reporting with an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare.

How Google Analytics 4 identifies users

If a shopper heads to your site on their smartphone, realizes the user interface (UI) design makes it difficult to add items to their cart, and switches to their MacBook, does GA4 record this as 1 user or 2? That depends on which option you select in your ‘Reporting identity’ settings. 

GA4 uses 3 different methods to identify users:

1. Device-based: Device ID uses cookies to identify users by their device. This is GA4’s default method. It can be imprecise, since it doesn’t allow for the fact that the same user might visit from different devices. In other words, if a user checked out your site on their laptop, before purchasing your product on their mobile, GA4 would register them as 2 separate users. 

2. Observed: this is a more accurate way to identify a user. When you select the ‘Observed’ option for reporting identity, Google tries User ID—a unique customer identifier usually assigned when users log into their Google account—then Device ID (in that order) to identify your website or app’s users. 

3. Blended: when you select the ‘Blended’ option for reporting identity, Google tries to identify users with User ID, followed by Device ID, followed by something called ‘modelling’—a function which estimates activity when neither User ID nor Device ID is available. 

You can see how Google Analytics identifies your users by clicking on the hub icon in the bottom left corner, clicking on ‘Data display’, and then on ‘Reporting identity’.

Find this setting by clicking on the spoke icon in the bottom left of your screen 

Types of users in GA4

Understanding the 4 different types of users in GA4 helps you make sense of GA4’s rich quantitative data, so you get an accurate picture of who’s coming to your site and how long they stay, also known as session duration. With this info—and an assist from qualitative data that shows why users behave the way they do—you can create a better user experience (UX) for visitors to your website or web app.

1. Active users

Google Analytics knows that active users make marketers everywhere do a little happy dance—so they made it their default metric. ‘Active users’ is sometimes shown in GA4 simply as ‘users’. 

In GA4, active users are either new users or users with engaged sessions. An engaged session is where a visitor stayed on your page for 10+ seconds, had more than 1 pageview, or at least 1 conversion.

Find your active user numbers in the ‘Reports snapshot’—it’s the first option available in the ‘Reports’ tab.

Click ‘Reports’ > ‘Reports snapshot’ to access active user metrics

Once you’re in the Reports snapshot, you can see an overview of user data, such as:

• Average engagement time per active user: the average time an active user has your site in focus or your app in the foreground

• Active users in last 30 mins: the number of active users who visited your site or app in the last 30 minutes

• Active users by country: the number of active users per country or territory (via ISO-3166-1 alpha-2 code) visualized on a map 

• Track user activity over time: the number of active users over the past 30 days, 7 days, and 1 day. Use this data to see how users react to your latest campaigns. For example, when you release a new social media ad campaign, your user activity over 7 days might rise, compared to your 30-day performance.

This sub-section of the report shows how user activity has ebbed and flowed over time

2. Total users

In GA4, ‘total users’ shows anyone who visits your site, whether they bounce within seconds or stick around for hours. 

To find your total users, go to ‘Reports’ > ‘Engagement’. Then, click on ‘Events’. (In GA4, an event is a specific interaction a user has with your site or app. Starting a session or scrolling down the page both count as ‘events’.)

In the ‘Events’ report, there’s a breakdown of every type of action each person takes on your site. For example, you might learn that 400 out of 7,000 total users watch the video on your homepage.

Look for total users on the ‘Events’ page in GA4

3. New users

In GA4, a ‘new user’ is someone who’s visiting your site for the first time. This is logged as a ‘first_visit’ or ‘first_open’ event.

View your new user metrics by clicking on ‘Reports’ > ‘Acquisition’ > ‘Overview’. This report provides an at-a-glance understanding of how many new visitors your site’s attracting.

The ‘Overview’ report lets you toggle between a graph of active users (also known as just ‘users’) and ‘new users’ 

💡 Pro tip: you can also gain valuable insights from the ‘User acquisition’ report. This shows you exactly where your new users come from—such as direct (by entering your URL into the search bar), organic social, or organic search. Below that, it lists user engagement per source. 

Viewing new user metrics lets you gauge how effective your marketing campaigns are—and where you need to focus your lead-generation efforts to best connect with right-fit prospects.

This site’s ‘new users’ from organic social have a much higher engagement rate than those from direct or organic search

4. Returning users

The only thing that’s better than new users are ones who return to your site or app again and again. Why? It’s a great sign that your users are satisfied—and on their way to brand loyalty.

In GA4, returning users are people who’ve previously visited your website or app. If they stopped by at least once before—even if they didn’t engage during that session—they’re considered returning users. 

To access an overview of your returning users, click on ‘Reports’ > ‘Retention’. Then, compare new vs. returning users within a specific time period.

A graph allows you to compare new users to returning users within a specific timeframe

What you can’t learn about users from GA4

GA4 is a powerful platform that shows the number of users on your product or site and how their activity trends over time. But, it can’t provide contextual data that tells you why users behave the way they do on your website or app. 

In GA4, you can’t learn:

• How users think or feel as they browse your app or site

• Why they click the call to action (CTA) at the bottom of your landing page

• Why they keep scrolling

• What makes them drop off your site

• How satisfied they were with their experience on your site or digital product

• Why some users bounce within seconds 

This data helps you better understand your users and improve the experience for them. 

But we’ve got good news: Contentsquare's experience intelligence platform picks up where GA4 leaves off. That means you can use the Contentsquare-GA4 integration to gather all the UX data you need to ensure your users are happy campers who stick around. Here’s how.

1. Surveys

Sometimes the best way to gather info about your users is to ask them. With Contentsquare’s Surveys capability, you can create and launch surveys quickly to follow up on what you see in GA4. Try these examples:

• If GA4 shows a dip in active users → launch an exit-intent survey to determine why users leave without engaging

• If GA4 shows that most of your traffic comes from direct search → launch a traffic attribution survey to learn how these visitors heard about you 

• If GA4 shows a spike in returning users → launch a customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) to gauge how satisfied they are, and why

Struggling to think what kind of survey would be most helpful for understanding your analytics data? Try Contentsquare’s AI assistant for surveys. Enter your survey goals into the tool, and it’ll generate effective questions to collect the insights you need. 

Contentsquare’s Surveys capability lets you collect and analyze user feedback instantly.

2. Session Replays  

When you look at your GA4 metrics, it’s easy to think of users in the most impersonal sense. Each user is a dot—or a tiny fraction of a dot—on a line graph. To maintain a customer-centric perspective, you have to empathize with the individual people on the other side of the screen. 

Contentsquare’s Session Replay capability lets you watch sessions of individual users interacting with your site—so you can experience every click, mouse movement, and scroll with them. You see what makes them pause and what prompts them to keep scrolling and clicking.

While GA4 shows you the outcome—for example, whether your total users have dropped—session replays show you the lead-up, whether that’s a user’s wild mouse movements as they try to navigate a carousel or rage clicks as they attempt to open a non-clickable element.

Sort replays in Contentsquare by frustration score to walk in the shoes of users most likely to bounce—and find ways to reduce friction for them

3. Heatmaps

GA4 crunches the numbers on user engagement—but you need another tool to dig into the context of what’s going on. 

Use Contentsquare’s Heatmaps capability to visualize how users engage with your pages and evaluate your marketing efforts. Use

1. Click maps to see what users click on

2. Scroll maps to see how far they scroll

3. Move maps to see where they moved their mouse

4. Zoning analysis to break your pages down into ‘zones’ so you can see which content blocks (Ex: images, copy, CTAs) had the biggest impact on your key metrics, including things like conversions, clicks, and revenue 

By analyzing heatmaps, you know exactly what active users enjoy about your site (and what frustrates them or interrupts their journey) so you can find ways to improve their experience.

For example, GA4 might show you how many users click a CTA. With heatmaps, you can see the number of people who stopped scrolling before they even made it that far—and any non-clickable elements they tried to click on before they gave up.

A Contentsquare’s Heatmaps allows you to investigate the impact of various elements on your key metrics 

4. User tests  

How do you know if users manage to complete their goals on your site successfully, whether that means finding the product they were looking for, or subscribing to your service? Paying close attention to your user metrics in GA4 might offer some idea, but it’ll be impossible to know for sure without further investigation. 

With Contentsquare's User Tests capability, you can set participants tasks to accomplish on your site (Ex: “order a monthly coffee subscription”) and observe how they go about completing them. If they encounter issues or take an unexpected path—that’s great feedback for improving your UX. 

Recruiting participants is effortless, since Contentsquare provides access to a pool of 200k users. The whole testing process is automated, so you can launch tests the same day as you decide to run them.  

Contentsquare significantly reduces the admin of organizing user tests, so you get valuable insights faster

Put your users first with GA4 + Contentsquare 🤝

When it comes to gaining insights on your users, Google Analytics and Contentsquare are a power duo. By using GA4 to collect detailed quantitative metrics—and Contentsquare to supply the necessary context—you learn exactly who your users are, what they need, and why. With this info, you can optimize your website or web app, increase users, and create an experience that delights.

FAQs about Google Analytics users