What is a GA4 Metric and Dimension?
Last year, Google closed Universal Analytics. This forced the transition of all UA users to their new tracking model, GA4.
Google explained their reasoning: “Universal Analytics was built for a generation of online measurement that was anchored in the desktop web, independent sessions and more easily observable data from cookies. This measurement is quickly becoming obsolete.”
This was big news for marketing and data, as UA has long been a foundation for marketers to assess website performance. With the push to GA4, Google has created a tool more adapted to the current web environment – and how users interact with multiple devices.
As we shift from UA to GA4, Google has released several new features and terms. In this article, we will focus on metrics and dimensions and the types of each. Metrics and dimensions are the most valuable tools used to measure and analyse website performance, and provide insights to future trends.
Metrics
Engagement Metric
Engagement metrics measures the level of user interaction or engagement with your website. They can help you understand how users interact with your content and whether they find it valuable, interesting, or engaging.
- Average Engagement Time: The average time users spend on your website or app during a session.
- Engagement Rate: The percentage of sessions during which users engaged with your website or app.
- Scroll Depth: The percentage of the page users scrolled through during a session.
This can provide you with a lot of valuable insights for the future, such as the ability to identify your popular content and adjust your strategy accordingly, and acknowledge your user experience (UX) and make the relevant interface changes.
Monetisation Metric
Monetisation metrics measure the financial performance of your website. They are specifically designed to track revenue, transactions, and other monetary data and are critical for businesses that rely on e-commerce, online advertising, or other forms of revenue generation.
- Revenue: The total revenue generated from transactions on your website or app.
- Transactions: The total number of transactions completed on your website or app.
- Average Order Value (AOV): The average revenue generated per transaction.
- Product Revenue: The total revenue generated from the sale of a specific product.
- Refund Amount: The total amount refunded to customers for returned products or cancelled orders.
Monetisation metrics can bring much value to companies in that they provide a means of measuring your revenue growth and optimising your product offerings.
Retention Metric
Retention metrics measure how often users return to your website after their initial visit. These metrics help you understand the stickiness of your website or app and how well you’re able to retain users over time.
- User Retention: The percentage of users who return to your website or app after their initial visit.
- New Users: The number of first-time visitors to your website or app.
- Returning Users: The number of users who return to your website or app after their initial visit.
- Session Interval: The average time between a user’s sessions on your website or app.
- Session Duration: The average time users spend on your website or app during a session.
Companies can gain valuable insights from these metrics, such as finding loyal users to target.
Event Metric
Event metrics measure users’ interactions with your website or app that aren’t related to page views. Events are actions users take on your website, such as clicking a button, watching a video, or downloading a file. Event metrics measure the frequency and effectiveness of these interactions and help you understand how users are engaging with your content.
- Event Count: The total number of times an event occurred on your website or app.
- Unique Events: The number of unique users who performed a specific event on your website or app.
- Event Value: The total value associated with a specific event, such as the revenue generated from a purchase event.
- Event Duration: The average duration of time that users spend performing a specific event on your website or app.
Event metrics allow you to track things like form submissions and e-commerce transactions to better understand your campaigns’ effectiveness and see what needs improving. It also provides a method of A/B testing, as you can test different variations of webpages and see which one works best.
Dimensions
Dimensions are attributes of user behaviour that can be used to segment and analyse website data. They provide context to the metrics and allow you to analyse your website or app performance based on specific attributes, such as country, device type, traffic source, user behaviour, and so on. GA4 provides a variety of built-in dimensions that can be used to segment and analyse website data. These can be classed under three main categories.
User Dimension
User dimensions provide information about the characteristics and behaviours of traffic to your website. The user dimension allows you to segment your audience based on various attributes such as demographics, interests, acquisition channels, and engagement metrics.
- Age: This dimension shows the age range of your website or app users, allowing you to segment your audience based on different age groups.
- Gender: This dimension shows the gender of your website or app users, allowing you to segment your audience based on male or female.
- Interests: This dimension shows the interests of your website or app users, allowing you to segment your audience based on different interest categories, such as sports, travel, or technology.
- Geography: This dimension shows the location of your website or app users, allowing you to segment your audience based on different geographic regions or countries.
User dimensions provide companies with valuable insights, such as knowing how to make your marketing efforts more personalised by segmenting into different groups. One of the best ways to market is to provide solutions to pain points, so this will make the process a lot easier. It can also give your strategies more direction by discovering which demographics are your primary audience. For example, if your main audience is 50 and over, Facebook would be a more suitable platform than Instagram.
Event Dimension
As previously mentioned, an event is an action a user takes on your website. Event dimensions provide information about the user interactions with your website.
- Clicks: This event dimension tracks when a user clicks on a specific element on your website or app, such as a button or link.
- Form Submissions: This event dimension tracks when a user submits a form on your website or app, such as a contact or registration form.
- Video Interactions: This event dimension tracks when a user interacts with a video on your website or app, such as playing, pausing, or completing a video.
- Pageviews: This event dimension tracks when a user views a specific page or screen on your website or app.
The event dimension allows you to analyse and track user behaviour by categorising and grouping user interactions into specific events. This can be useful in a number of ways, such as analysing your user journey and optimising it to increase your engagement rate and understanding your audience’s behaviour by seeing how they are interacting with your website and what pages work best.
Item Dimension
Item dimensions provide information about products or items users interact with on your website. An item can refer to any product, service, or content you offer on your website, such as a product in your e-commerce store or a blog post.
- Item Name: This dimension provides the name of the item that users interacted with, such as the name of a product in an e-commerce store or the title of a blog post.
- Item ID: This dimension provides a unique identifier for each item, such as a product ID in an e-commerce store or an article ID in a content management system.
- Item Category: This dimension categorises items into different groups based on their characteristics, such as product categories in an e-commerce store or content categories on a website.
- Item Brand: This dimension provides the brand name of the item that users interacted with, such as the brand of a product in an e-commerce store.
Item dimensions allow you to analyse and track user behaviour by categorising and grouping user interactions based on the items they interact with. This can be useful in many ways, such as optimising your product recommendations by seeing which products users have interacted with in the past and, in turn, better understanding your product performance (which ones are being viewed and purchased most).
Metrics and dimensions work hand in hand. An easy way to remember their roles is that metrics are numerical values, and dimensions are the non-numerical explanations of what those numbers are and how they came to be.
Fully understanding them can benefit you in a plethora of ways, but it takes a lot of skill and time to get to a point where you can fully benefit from them. Working with an agency that already has this expertise can be a great way to get the ball rolling, especially as GA4 has already been released.
At Growthlabs, we specialise in helping businesses grow their online presence and increase revenue using a range of digital marketing services. Our team are extensively trained in Google applications, including GA4, and would have no trouble discovering relevant insights using the platform on your behalf. On top of this, we provide a customised approach, as we realise that not every company is the same and we all have different needs and objectives. So, we work closely with you to ensure every step we take aligns with your business.