GA4 New Metrics: Conversion Rate & More

After a quite period, Google Analytics just last night released a couple of metrics and dimensions often clamored by insiders and not: I’m talking above all about the Conversion Rate and, to a lesser extent, the Bounce Rate (we talked about it in a previous article).

Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate and UTM are available within GA4 reports, explorations, segments, audiences and even APIs.

If at the moment you don’t see them active in your account / properties don’t worry, they are being rolled out.

GA4: Conversion Rate

A fact that was absolutely missing in Google Analytics 4 is represented above all by the Conversion Rate dedicated to conversion events. From now on, however, GA4 offers two types of Conversion Rate.

The following new metrics allow you to generate conversion rate reports for any conversion event:

• User Conversion Rate: is the percentage of users who have activated any conversion event
• Session Conversion Rate: is the percentage of sessions in which any conversion event has been triggered

Not bad, right?

GA4: Bounce Rate

First, the GA4 Bounce Rate is not comparable with that of Universal Analytics as the calculation methods are completely different. In GA4 the Bounce Rate is intended as the percentage of sessions that do not become “engaged sessions”, in other words the bounce rate is the inverse of the Engagement Rate.

Personal Opinion: As calculated in Google Analytics 4, the Engaged Session / Engagement Rate provides a more detailed way to measure the level at which customers interact with the site or app than any form of Bounce Rate.

GA4: UTM term & Content

The utm_content and utm_term parameters are now available in Explorations, Reports and Audiences. Both parameters have a user-scoped dimension and a session-scoped dimension:

• First user manual ad content / term
• Session manual ad content / term

GA4: First Time Purchasers

Here is one of the most interesting metrics if you have an eCommerce: First Time Purchasers Conversion, that is the percentage of active users who have made the first purchase in the time frame considered. The second is the First Time Purchasers for New Users which indicates the percentage of buyers for new users.

Thanks to these two metrics it will be possible to go even deeper in relation to the characteristics of the users of the site and above all in terms of onboarding and retention for all the marketing campaigns set for an eCommerce.