Google Analytics 4: Lifetime Value – New metrics and report

As always, not a day goes by without GA4 releasing a new feature: today it’s the turn of the “User Lifetime” report and associated metrics.

Compared to the previous version in Universal Analytics, this new report is much more flexible but much more complex.

At the moment there is no information in the Google Analytics guides and we are trying to understand how to use it -> read: this will be a work-in-progress post. Here what we know at the moment.

GA4: User LifeTime Value

To access this report just go to “Explore> Analysis Hub” and select “User Lifetime”. The screen that will appear will resemble the following.

As you can see, in the “Metrics” section there are many new metrics dedicated to LifeTime Value, such as LTV Average, LifeTime Engagement, LifeTime Transactions, and many others (see screenshot at the end of the post).

Compared to what is reported in Universal Analytics, in this new report it is possible to choose more dimensions (5 max) to be included as table rows and as many dimensions as columns to create nested pivot tables.

A very interesting point is the possibility of visualizing the data obtained depending on BarChart, Plain Text or Heatmap:

Furthermore, if you right-click on a cell, you can include or exclude the selected value.

The metrics available are really a lot, as you can see from the screenshot below:

GA4: LifetimeValue – Remarks

At the moment the new LTV metrics show a high potential because, thanks to Machine Learning, they bring within the Google Analytics platform KPIs related to ecommerce and which are currently missing in Universal Analytics.

Data are also updated automatically while in the previous version they must be imported at intervals of 24 hours in order to generate complete analyzes.

I’m expecting that soon also the offline data can be imported through the measurement protocol or API: in this way we could enter, with a single tool, into the Phygital world!

Soon I hope to be able to give you more updates on this amazing new metric!