GA4 Metrics Explained: User Behavior Cheat Sheet

Google Analytics has been one of the top tools for marketers in the past decade, and it became the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet as.

As of April 2025, GA4 (the latest production release of Google Analytics) surfaces automatically-generated insights directly in report pages (e.g., sudden “Purchase” spikes), with one-click access to key drivers. What’s more, since June 2025, GA4 360 users can now auto‑sync custom dimensions/metrics across sub‑properties.

Overall, one of the main aspects you need to understand are the GA4 metrics, and that is exactly what we will be talking about today.

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10 GA4 Metrics to Help You Understand User Behavior

1. Users
2. Engagement Rate
3. Average Engagement Rate
4. Sessions
5. Views
6. Event Count
7. Conversions
8. Conversion Rate
9. Total Revenue
10. Lifetime Value

1. Users

Of course, the first stop on the GA4 metrics highway are the users. After all, you cannot run a successful business without customers, right?

The GA4 user metric helps you to understand your target audience by showing the total number of unique users that interacted with your website.

Since GA4’s 2025 updates, this metric uses AI‑powered audience segmentation, automatically grouping users by predicted behaviors, such as “high purchase likelihood” or “churn risk”.

This allows you to tailor content and campaigns much more effectively. GA4’s privacy-first, cookieless approaches mean user counts rely on a mix of device IDs, modeled data, and aggregated signals, ensuring accuracy even with evolving regulations

In practice, ‘Users’ allows you to know just how many people are engaging with your website. Furthermore, through continuous tracking, you can interpret whether your content is achieving its goals or not.

For instance, if you notice that the number of new users is growing, that is a clear indication that you are doing a good job with your content, and giving customers what they want.

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2. Engagement Rate

Next up on our list is a new Google Analytics metric called engagement rate. It offers insights into how customers are interacting with your content.

An “engaged” session meets at least one of:

• 10 seconds duration

• ≥2 pageviews or screenviews

• ≥1 key (conversion) event

The Engagement Rate in GA4 is now the default KPI, calculated as:

Engaged Sessions ÷ Total Sessions × 100%

New in 2025: GA4 includes Time to First Action, revealing how quickly users take meaningful steps, adding context to the engagement rate. This helps you understand not just if, but when users engage, which is crucial for UX and speed optimizations.

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3. Average Engagement Time

Do you want to know how much time users spend on your page on average? That is made simple with the GA4 average engagement time metric.

This metric tracks average time content was actively viewed, counting only when the browser or app was in focus, offering a more precise measure of attention than session length. Now in 2025, there’s also Average Engagement Time per Session/User, letting you compare how different segments perform over time.

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4. Sessions

The sessions metric is fundamental, as it shows the number of sessions that started on your website. What is a session, you ask? In practice, it is when a user opens your website.

Sessions are still tracked as GA4 starts a session when a user interacts and stops 30 minutes after inactivity. GA4 corrects for midnight resets and new traffic sources, offering more consistent session data.

Coupled with user segmentation, you can now track session trends across different user types (e.g. high-value vs. new) enabling nuanced analysis.

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5. Views

Want to know more about the amount of times a certain webpage was viewed by users? Look no further than the views metric.

This is not just some kind of vanity metric, quite the opposite. Previously called “Pageviews/Screenviews,” Views now count each time a page or screen loads.

In 2025, this metric can be automatically segmented by predicted user intent cohorts, helping you see which pages engage high‑value audiences, not just any visitors.

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6. Event Count

Some specific actions your users take on your site are more important than others. Naturally, you want more visitors to convert into customers, and you want to know the percentage of first time visitors, respectively.

Here comes the event count GA4 metric, which can track the number of times your visitors triggered a specific event.

Furthermore, GA4 records all interactions as events: from scrolls to custom activities. Metrics include total Event Count, Events per Session, and Event Count per User.

You can now enrich these with custom parameters and predictive labeling (e.g., ‘likely conversion’), enabling better event-level analytics and automation.

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7. Conversions

In GA4, Key Event flips are counted as Conversions. You can now track session-based vs. user-based conversion metrics, across cohorts segmented by predicted behavior, like “likely purchase.” GA4’s machine learning also supports anomaly detection, flagging unusual conversion drops in real time.

On its own, the overall user engagement can indicate a lot regarding the level of user friendliness of your site, effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, and the way your customers interact with your website.

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8. Conversion Rate

GA4 offers date-synced Session Conversion Rate and User Conversion Rate, both available across user cohorts and traffic channels. Now, GA4 automatically surfaces which source audiences (e.g., high-value or at-risk) convert best, helping you optimize budget allocation.

These metrics are especially useful to eCommerce stores, since they can help them identify the top performing traffic sources, or in other words, where most of their customers are coming from.

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9. Total Revenue

Making a profit always matters. One of the best ways to track this is through GA4. Your Total Revenue metric (subscriptions, purchases, ad revenue) now integrates revenue forecasting via GA4 predictive analytics, estimating revenue for emerging cohort trends before they complete a transaction

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10. User Lifetime

Last, but not least on our list, it is the lifetime value GA4 metric. It provides information about your best users, based on lifetime performance.

Lifetime Value (LTV) links user acquisition sources to long-term value. In 2025, GA4 supports Cohort LTV analysis augmented by predictive churn probability, letting you focus on channels that bring not only high-volume users, but high-value and low-churn audiences.

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GA4 vs. Universal Analytics: What Has Changed?

Many of you are familiar with how the old universal analytics used to measure and track user behavior, along with the names of the metrics, and so on.

Now, there will be some initial uncertainty on what is where, how it is called, what was changed… etc.

What Is Still the Same?

The two platforms DO have a lot in common. In terms of data and reporting, they are especially similar.

In practice, everything that you measured in Universal Analytics, you can measure in GA4, and all the reporting options are still available.

Of course, just like Universal Analytics, GA4 is completely free to use. Another similarity is the user interface – if you used the old version of Google Analytics a lot, then you will find your way around GA4 fairly easy.

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GA4 New Features

Naturally, since GA4 is an entirely new platform, it hosts a number of different features that were not available in Universal Analytics.

Here’s a neat list of the main ones:

1. Event tracking.

   One of the biggest shifts in GA4 compared to Universal Analytics is the event-driven data model. Every interaction, such as clicks, scrolls, form submissions, and video plays, is tracked as an event. In 2025, GA4 supports event parameters and custom dimensions more natively, allowing you to attach contextual data to each event (e.g. button ID, page category). You can also now define event-scoped custom metrics directly in the GA4 interface without editing your code or GTM container.

2. Mobile app data. GA4 lets you measure user interactions across both websites and mobile apps in a single property, which was not possible in Universal Analytics. Mobile app data setup uses the Firebase SDK, and now in 2025, GA4 supports automatic event tracking for in-app actions like screen views, in-app purchases, and push notification interactions.
3. Cookieless tracking. The use of third-party cookies is slowly but surely going away. Google made sure that GA4 is as privacy sensitive as possible by using first-party cookies, combined with AI, to fill in the gaps, keeping the platform GDPR compliant.
4. Machine learning. GA4’s predictive capabilities continue to evolve. You still have: Purchase Probability, Churn Probability, and Predicted Revenue. As of 2025, GA4 includes Predicted LTV (lifetime value), enabling cohort-level revenue forecasting. You can also apply AI-generated insights across multiple segments with custom alert rules for anomaly detection in conversions, sessions, and revenue.
5. Easy integration with Google products. Unlike before, Google Analytics will now be extremely easy to integrate with other Google products, including Google Ads, Big Query, Google Merchant Center, etc. In 2025, GA4  supports automated audience sync with Google Ads for remarketing and has enhanced match rate reporting between Ads and Analytics.
6. Dashboard customization. The Report Library lets you create, edit, and publish custom dashboard views. In 2025, you can also import prebuilt templates for common use cases (e.g., eCommerce performance, acquisition source analysis, churn reports).
7. Intuitive search.

   The search bar in GA4 acts more like a smart assistant now. You can ask complex, natural-language questions like: “Which channel had the highest revenue last quarter?” and “Show top converting landing pages for mobile users.” New in 2025: GA4 search now includes autocomplete with metric suggestions, and click-to-copy formulas for advanced users building custom reports.

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Wrap-Up

Like it or not, Google Analytics 4 is here to stay. It’s better to welcome it now and learn how to use it to your advantage, than risk falling behind your competitors. Besides, it is a good tool. It can provide some great insights into the behavior of your users.

Using the knowledge from GA4 metrics, you can also make educated decisions on which channels provide the best value for your business, or how it reacts in terms of customer acquisition. It can even help you decide where to spend your marketing budget.

Of course, just like any other piece of data, it is ultimately up to you to decipher its hidden meaning, and decide what course of action to take.