What are metrics in Google Analytics?
Metrics are numerical measurements that show how much or how many of something happened on your website or app. Examples include users, sessions, page views, conversions, and revenue—metrics quantify your performance.
Further reading: custom dimensions & metrics
Common GA4 metrics to track:
Metrics are quantitative measurements that show how your website or app is performing. The metrics you focus on should align with your business and measurement goals.
Metrics work together with dimensions, which provide context by describing the data behind the numbers. As you read on, you’ll see how metrics and dimensions combine to give you meaningful insights.
The following metrics are broadly applicable and worth reviewing for most organizations:
👉 Users & Sessions in GA4
GA4 reports four main user types: total users, active users, new users, and returning users. Each helps you understand a different aspect of your audience.
1. New Users
New users are people who visit your site for the first time within the selected date range. GA4 identifies them when the first_visit event is triggered, using unique identifiers to distinguish new visitors from existing ones.
This metric helps to understand how effective your marketing and acquisition channels are at attracting fresh traffic.
2. Returning Users
Returning users are users who have visited your site before and come back again. This metric is for measuring user retention and loyalty, as repeat visits often indicate that users find value in your content or offerings.
3. Active Users
Active users represent people who engaged with your site during the selected period. A user is considered active if they had at least one engaged session.
An engaged session lasts 10 seconds or more, includes at least one conversion event, or contains two or more pageviews or screenviews.
4. Total Users
Total users show the total number of unique visitors who visited your site within the selected date range. This metric includes both new and returning users and provides a high-level view of your overall audience size.
5. Sessions
A session is a period of time during which a user interacts with your website or app. It starts when a user opens a page and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.
A session can include multiple actions—such as page views, clicks, events, and transactions—or just a single page view. One user can generate multiple sessions in a day.
Think of a session as a container that holds all user activities during a single visit.
6. Views / Page Views
In GA4, Views represent the total number of pageviews (web) and screenviews (apps) during a selected period. This metric includes repeated views of the same page or screen by the same user.
Views help identify your most popular content and show how deeply users explore your site. For example, if you have many more views than users, it usually means visitors are navigating multiple pages and engaging with your content.
7. Average Engagement Time
Average engagement time shows how long your site was actively in focus in a user’s browser. Longer engagement usually means stronger content, better UX, or higher purchase/lead intent.
8. Session Conversion Rate
Session conversion rate measures the percentage of sessions that resulted in a conversion. This metric is for evaluating how well your site turns traffic into leads or sales.
9. Entrances
Entrances show how often users start their journey on a specific page. This is useful for identifying which landing pages attract traffic and how effective they are at capturing attention.
10. Exits
Exits show the pages users most often leave from.
11. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged (left quickly with no interaction). A high bounce rate may indicate irrelevant traffic, poor content, or weak landing pages.
What Is Considered a “High” Bounce Rate in GA4?
There’s no single “bad” number, but here’s a practical benchmark most analysts use:
Below 40% → Very good (strong engagement)
40%–60% → Normal / acceptable
60%–70% → High (worth reviewing)
70%+ → Very high (likely an issue)
Bounce rate depends on page intent:
Blog posts and informational pages often have higher bounce rates
Landing pages for leads or sales should aim for lower bounce rates
So always judge bounce rate together with engagement time and conversions, not on its own.
12. Engaged Sessions
Engaged sessions are sessions that last longer than 10 seconds, include multiple views, or trigger a conversion. This metric helps you focus on quality traffic rather than raw volume.
13. Views Per User
Views per user shows how many pages or screens each user views on average. Higher values usually indicate better content discovery and deeper engagement.
14. Average Session Duration
Average session duration shows how long a typical visit lasts. Longer sessions often mean users are more interested in your content, products, or services.
15. Transactions
Transactions represent completed purchases on an ecommerce site. This is a core metric for measuring sales performance and checkout effectiveness.
16. Total Revenue
Total revenue shows the money generated from purchases, subscriptions, or ads. It’s the metric for understanding the financial impact of your marketing and website performance.
Important Note:
Not all businesses or websites track the same GA4 metrics. Some metrics are more relevant for ecommerce sites, while others matter more for lead-generation websites or high-ticket businesses.
Because time and resources are limited, certain metrics may be considered “vanity metrics” for one type of business but critical indicators for another. The key is to focus on the metrics that align with your specific business goals and decision-making needs.
Views vs. Sessions vs. Users in GA
A user is an individual person who visits your website. A session is a single visit, and a view is a page or screen the user sees during that visit.
One user can have multiple sessions, and each session can include multiple views.
Because of this, Google Analytics typically shows more views than sessions, and more sessions than users.
How does Google Analytics work?
Google Analytics is installed on your website using a JavaScript tracking code. The software collects data as users interact with your site.
How Does Google Analytics Track Sessions?
Google Analytics tracks sessions using first-party cookies and event data.
When a user visits your site, GA4 starts a session, assigns a session ID, and records all interactions (such as page views, clicks, and conversions) as events within that session.
A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, and GA4 then saves the final session data for reporting.
In GA4, go to Admin → Data Streams, select your website, then open Configure tag settings.
From here, you can define internal traffic, list unwanted referrals, adjust session timeout, and override cookie settings to better control how data is collected and reported.
Further reading: 12 important GA4 Metrics according to Semrush
What is "Page Path" & "Screen Class"
“Page path” is the part of the URL that follows the domain name. “Screen class” is the page path equivalent for a mobile app.