GA4: Library, Collections, Adjust Session Timeout & Engaged Session

Third and last chapter of the saga dedicated to GA4’s new features and UI restyling. I’m going to talk about the Library section and specifically the creation of the Collections, also taking a look at the new session timeout and engaged session management panel. Indeed I’m starting from the latter as it is much simpler and more immediate.

GA4: Adjust Session Timeout & Engaged Session

To access the feature just go and select the stream of interest > More Tagging Settings> Adjust session timeout. As you can see the screen is split in two sections:

• Adjust session timeout: that is, I can change the session timeout interval at the hourly level (up to 7 hours)
• Adjust time for engaged sessions: the default engaged session is triggered after 10 seconds on the site or app; thanks to this configuration I can decide to increase the timing to 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 seconds.

We therefore have an additional configuration system available to make each single Web Stream even more customizable.

GA4: Library & Collections

I think this is one of the major features released by GA4 at the interface level: we can create our navigation menu through simple steps and drag & drop. As you can understand, customization in the new Google tool seems to be a key point. First you have to click on the “Library” item that you find at the bottom of the Report menu. Once clicked, you will find yourself into the interface below:

1. Collection: the term refers to a set of reports. The Lifecycle and User collections are always displayed by default. The Collections come in the form of Cards (each with a title) containing the assigned report groupings and we can decide whether to edit, publish, create a copy, rename or delete them.
2. Reports: the reports we saw in the first article of the series can be created here

GA4: How to create a new collection

First, click on the “Create new collection” card and the new screen will open:

We can choose whether to create it from scratch (1) or use one of the templates made available by Google (2). We opted for the first option.

In this section we have to include via drag’n’drop the rerports that we find on the left (2) in the new collection (1).

Before carrying out the drag’n’drop we must give a name to the section / s that we want to be displayed inside the collection: just click on “Create New Topic” and enter a meaningful title. Obviously also replace “Untitled collection” with a meaningful title.

“Detail Report” is meant to be the single report of interest (eg Conversion, Events, etc.) while into the “Overview Report” we find the macro categories of the report groupings (default dashboard category) Once you have made your choices we will get something similar to the screnshoot below.

Now just click on “Save” and it will appear as a card in the Collections home page. To make the new Collection appear in the Reports menu, click on the three dots at the top right of the card and choose “Publish”.

Once published, as you can see, the collection appears among the GA4 reports and you can start analyzing the data you have selected!

I considered Google Universal a truly flexible tool compared to many competitors but after the introduction of these new features I think GA4 takes the concept of personalization to an even higher level! We just have to wait for more news from Google and start “playing” and “testing” what we have shared in the series of posts!