The One Where Google Launched the Engagement Rate

Understanding Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Engagement Rate: A Comprehensive Guide

Hey Group Venture family! Welcome back to another episode with your hosts, John Paul and Ted. Today, we’re diving into a crucial topic for marketers and website owners alike—Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and its engagement rate. If you’re a CEO who finds analytics a bit too technical, don’t tune out just yet; this is essential information for understanding your audience’s interactions with your website or app.

The Transition from Universal Analytics to GA4

In July, Google transitioned from Universal Analytics to GA4, a move that stirred up mixed reactions. Universal Analytics focused primarily on pageviews, which worked well in a classic web environment where users navigated through static HTML pages. However, with the evolution of technology—introducing web apps, single-page applications (SPAs), and JavaScript-driven sites—the limitations of pageview-centric analytics became apparent.

John Paul pointed out that pageviews just don’t work well for modern websites that are more app-like. With GA4, Google has moved towards an event-based measurement strategy, which is more suitable for today’s web technologies. But before we delve deeper into the engagement rate, let’s understand the significant changes that GA4 brings to the table.

Why GA4?

GA4 is a total rewrite from Universal Analytics. While the exact reasons for this overhaul remain speculative—be it legacy code issues or the need for a more integrated approach to web and mobile analytics—the shift signifies a broader change in how user interactions are measured.

Universal Analytics primarily focused on pageviews and sessions, which were straightforward metrics in a web environment that relied heavily on static pages. However, the advent of dynamic web applications and single-page applications (SPAs) posed challenges to this model. These modern applications do not necessarily trigger new pageviews with every interaction, leading to gaps in data when using traditional pageview-centric analytics.

GA4 addresses these issues by focusing on events rather than pageviews. Every interaction is tracked as an event, whether it’s a pageview, a button click, a scroll, or a video play. This event-based model provides a more comprehensive view of user behavior, making it possible to track interactions across different platforms, including websites and mobile apps, seamlessly.

Engagement Rate: A New Metric for Modern Web Interactions

One of the significant changes in GA4 is the introduction of engagement rate, replacing the traditional bounce rate. Engagement rate offers a more nuanced view of user interactions by considering the following criteria for an “engaged user”:

• Time on Site: Users who spend more than 10 seconds on your site.
• Event Completions: Users who complete a conversion event.
• Pageviews/Screenviews: Users who visit at least two pages or screens in an app.

As Ted mentioned, this shift to an event-based measurement strategy aligns better with modern web interactions. However, it also places the onus on marketers to set up meaningful events and conversion tracking.

Understanding the Criteria for Engagement

The shift from bounce rate to engagement rate is not just a change in terminology; it represents a shift in how we think about user interactions. Let’s break down the criteria for an engaged user:

1. Time on Site: The time a user spends on your site is a crucial indicator of engagement. GA4 considers a user engaged if they spend more than 10 seconds on your site. This threshold helps filter out users who land on your page and leave almost immediately, indicating a lack of interest or relevance.

2. Event Completions: Engagement is also defined by users completing specific events that you deem valuable. These could be anything from filling out a form, clicking on a button, watching a video, or making a purchase. By defining these events as conversions, you can measure how effectively your site drives these valuable actions.

3. Pageviews/Screenviews: For websites, an engaged user is one who views at least two pages. For mobile apps, this translates to screenviews. This criterion helps gauge whether users are exploring more of your content or app features.

Setting Up Events in GA4

In Universal Analytics, marketers often used Google Tag Manager to set up events, pushing data into reports for insights on user interactions. GA4 continues this event-based approach but requires a more thoughtful setup. Improperly defined events can skew engagement metrics, making it crucial to understand what constitutes a meaningful interaction on your site or app.

For novice users, this setup can be daunting. John Paul highlighted that setting up conversion events across sites can be complex and is not very intuitive. It’s essential to spend time defining what conversion events matter most to your business and configuring GA4 accordingly. Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up events in GA4:

1. Identify Key Interactions: Determine what actions on your site or app are most valuable. These could include clicks on a “Buy Now” button, form submissions, video plays, or scroll depth.

2. Use Google Tag Manager (GTM): GTM is a powerful tool that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags without editing your code. Set up tags to track your identified key interactions as events.

3. Configure Events in GA4: Once you’ve set up your tags in GTM, go to your GA4 property and configure these events. You can create custom events and mark them as conversions to ensure they’re tracked correctly.

4. Test and Validate: Before going live, test your setup to ensure the events are firing correctly and data is being recorded as expected. Use GA4’s debug mode to validate your configurations.

Benefits and Limitations of Engagement Rate

While engagement rate provides a more accurate picture of user interactions than bounce rate, it’s not without its limitations. It’s a transactional metric, focusing on whether a user did something rather than why they did it. As John Paul noted, it doesn’t provide deep insights into whether users understood your content or if it solved their problem.

Advantages of Engagement Rate

1. More Accurate Measurement: Engagement rate filters out users who bounce quickly, giving you a clearer picture of who is genuinely interacting with your content.

2. Event-Based Insights: By focusing on events, engagement rate allows you to track a wider range of interactions, providing a more comprehensive view of user behavior.

3. Better Alignment with Business Goals: Engagement rate can be tailored to measure the interactions that matter most to your business, whether it’s purchases, sign-ups, or other valuable actions.

Limitations of Engagement Rate

1. Lack of Qualitative Insights: While engagement rate tells you what users are doing, it doesn’t tell you why they’re doing it. Understanding user intent and satisfaction requires additional qualitative data.

2. Dependency on Proper Setup: The accuracy of engagement rate depends heavily on how well you’ve set up your events and conversions. Incorrect configurations can lead to misleading data.

3. Transactional Nature: Engagement rate is still fundamentally a transactional metric, focusing on discrete actions rather than providing a holistic view of user journeys and experiences.

Going Beyond Engagement Rate

To truly understand your audience and optimize your content, consider these additional strategies:

1. User Feedback: Implement surveys or feedback forms to gain qualitative insights. Tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey can help you gather direct feedback from your users about their experiences and satisfaction levels.

2. Heatmaps and Session Recordings: Tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg can help visualize user interactions and identify pain points. Heatmaps show you where users click, scroll, and spend the most time, while session recordings provide a play-by-play of individual user sessions.

3. Content Analysis: Regularly review content performance to see what resonates with your audience. Use tools like Google Search Console to understand search intent and refine your content strategy. Analyze metrics such as average time on page, scroll depth, and exit rates to gauge content effectiveness.

4. A/B Testing: Experiment with different versions of your content or site layout to see what works best. Tools like Google Optimize can help you run A/B tests and measure the impact on engagement and conversions.

5. Segmentation and Personalization: Use GA4’s segmentation features to break down your audience into meaningful groups based on behavior, demographics, or other criteria. Tailor your content and marketing efforts to these segments to enhance relevance and engagement.

Case Study: Improving Engagement with GA4

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical case study to illustrate how you can use GA4 to improve engagement.

Scenario: You run an e-commerce site selling outdoor gear. Your goal is to increase user engagement and drive more sales.

Step 1: Identify Key Interactions

• Add to Cart
• Checkout Initiation
• Product Video Views
• Scroll Depth (e.g., 50% down a product page)

Step 2: Set Up Events in GTM and GA4

• Use GTM to create tags for each key interaction.
• Configure these events in GA4 and mark “Add to Cart” and “Checkout Initiation” as conversions.

Step 3: Analyze Engagement Data

• Monitor the engagement rate for each key interaction.
• Identify pages with high engagement but low conversion rates.

Step 4: Implement Changes Based on Insights

• For pages with high engagement but low conversions, add more prominent call-to-action buttons and streamline the checkout process.
• Enhance product pages with engaging videos and detailed descriptions to encourage deeper interactions.

Step 5: Test and Iterate

• Use A/B testing to experiment with different page layouts, CTAs, and content.
• Continuously monitor engagement and conversion data to identify further opportunities for improvement.

Conclusion

GA4’s engagement rate offers a step forward in measuring modern web interactions, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Combining quantitative data from GA4 with qualitative insights will provide a more holistic view of your audience’s behavior and content effectiveness. By leveraging the full capabilities of GA4 and complementing

In this episode, John Paul Mains and Ted Jones discuss the topic of Google Analytics for engagement rate, specifically focusing on the transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). They highlight the shift from measuring page views to measuring engagement as GA4’s primary focus. Engagement is defined as a user spending more than 10 seconds on a website, taking specific actions (such as conversion events or multiple page views), or interacting with app screens. The transcript points out that GA4’s engagement-based approach is an improvement over the traditional bounce rate.

However, they express some concerns:

1. Lack of Qualitative Data: They discuss the limitations of GA4 in providing qualitative insights into user interactions and content understanding. They emphasize the need for better tools to understand whether users truly comprehend the content on a website.
2. Event-Based Measurement: GA4 is still fundamentally an event-based measurement platform, which may not capture the full spectrum of user engagement and understanding.
3. Content Optimization Challenges: The speakers highlight the importance of guiding users through a journey on a website and providing relevant call-to-actions, and how GA4 can help optimize this process.

Overall, the discussion revolves around the transition to GA4 and the hope for more profound insights into user behavior and content comprehension, while also recognizing the challenges associated with event-based analytics.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

content, bounce rate, events, engagement, Google Analytics, site, engaged, conversion, ga, page, seconds, user, insight, google, rate, chief complaint, great, pageviews, measurement, answer

SPEAKERS

Ted Jones, John Paul Mains

Episode Transcript

John Paul Mains  00:04

All right. Hey group venture family. We are back with another episode here with myself, John Paul and my buddy here. We’re here to Jones. Welcome back. Hey, so yeah, today our topic is Google Analytics for Indigo engagement rate. Right? Yes. So, you know, I bet a bunch of CEOs that listen to this have already tuned out. Some technical, but the marketers here. All right, this is something useful for y’all. Yeah, definitely. Obviously, Google forced Google Analytics for on us back here in July, for better or for worse. And yet, I tend to think it’s probably for the worse, but that’s just my opinions. I know, plenty people out there, like, but anyway, that’s, that’s aside. So the big change, at least from my perspective, that that this was about was merely moving from a page analytics platform, which was Universal Analytics, Universal Analytics really recorded page views. And that was what everything was based upon. Okay. Pretty straightforward. Pretty easy. We all get that. And that was kind of a little bit classic Web. Okay. Everything was based on HTML page, you click this page, you click this link, you go to this page, click this link, go to that page, right? Yeah. Yep. Very simple, very straightforward. Well, of course, technology didn’t sit still. We’ve got all sorts of, we’ve got web apps, apps, JavaScript driven sites that are react to sites that you can basically click a whole bunch of links. And page views really aren’t the measurement anymore than they hadn’t been for a long time. This is a chief complaint that I had was like, hey, you know, I’ve created this great website that is very app, like, but pageviews just don’t work.

Ted Jones  01:57

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

John Paul Mains  02:01

And we all got around this, we knew how to get around this, they released Google Tag Manager, which is great. I love Google Tag Manager, were able to set up events that would push into Google Analytics. And I could see, run plenty of reports, to be able to see what people did, what events, they took click of a button, a page load, a scroll it all sorts of different things, which you could set up as an event and create reports on user types, mobile device types, and how that impacted events and things like that. So it was pretty simple, straight, straightforward. Well, I have no idea why Google internally wanted to release GA four, which I believe my understanding is a total rewrite from what we had maybe it was old legacy code, which they couldn’t support anymore. Or I don’t know why. But well, yeah, I

Ted Jones  02:54

think your point too, it’s just that marrying of the technologies of web and just really mobile, whether it’s Apple app or mobile website, and just kind of bringing that together quite possibly.

John Paul Mains  03:06

Yeah, I agree with that. And now GA four. And when you look at G four, it’s more about engagement. Okay, this is the new big term, which they use a lot. And a lot of the material is engagement. And so it like things, things like bounce rate are gone. They now call it engagement rate. And the way they classified engagement is three different things which they classified as an engaged user. So an engaged user, just so we all know, engage user can be anybody that has been on your site for longer than 10 seconds. Okay.

Ted Jones  03:43

Possibly even a page two, just in one. Yes, General section,

John Paul Mains  03:47

Right? They could have done a conversion event, let’s put it like that as an event, or at least two page views or to your point with an app screen views. Okay. So they consider anybody an engaged person is having done those things. All right. So great. All right. So we’ve gone from page view to more of an engaged visitor and trying to measure around them. And so which is great, I’m glad that we’ve gone to more of an event based measurement strategy. Right? The problem is that the user that, the marketers in total control over all events. And so a, somebody who’s a novice at Google Analytics could set up all spamming lots of events and set up them all to be conversions and things like that and totally throw off engagement rate. Or, if you got

Ted Jones  04:46

that up and ready for it, I think your engagement rate, you know, defining what those conversions are, right? If you haven’t defined what a conversion is on your site, you might be a little upset with this. Right now.

John Paul Mains  05:00

That’s absolutely true. I’ve had to get it, we’ve spent a lot of time resetting up all conversion events across these sites, because it’s slightly different, but it’s still still not. To the average user, it’s like, I don’t know what to do. Yeah, it’s kind of buried, it’s not intuitive. And that’s been kind of the chief complaint on people migrating over this, but they got forced into it. So. So I think

Ted Jones  05:23

even you looking back at historically pageviews always kind of felt, you know, inflated, and it was always a big number, you know, that you can kind of look at, but, you know, if they’re kind of reframing this to event space, I think it does give that opportunity to kind of define that funnel define that experience. And, you know, and kind of talk about quality of the interactions versus the quantity of them,

John Paul Mains  05:49

right? Because like the bounce rate, which every marketer on the planet knows what a bounce rate is going to engagement and bounce rate was, it was totally inaccurate. Eventually got to be very inaccurate. Yeah, it was it was a measurement, but it became totally unusable. And I think engagement rate was their attempt to say it, do I have an engaged visitor on my website? Do they meet these three criteria enrich? And really, bounce rate is kind of included in that on sessions that lasts longer than 10 seconds. So

Ted Jones  06:24

yeah, well, in bounce rate to you know, someone could come to your site and consume just a single page, maybe they came from some other source, whatever, consume that leave in a minute or so and, you know, not interact with anything else. Right. Yeah. Which doesn’t necessarily I do like that. They’ve limited it now to 10 seconds.

John Paul Mains  06:49

Oh, yeah. It’s much shorter times in which I definitely prefer that, that’s for sure. Because, yeah, if a lot of people law, like a blog, I’m gonna come in, I’m not interested in all your content. I’m just interested in this particular piece of content, because it solves my problem at that point in time. So I’m looking at the blog. I’ll read it, read it, read it up, I’m done and won’t finish it. And I’m out of there. Like, got what I got my answer. And so there’s a lot of content out there like that. But 10 seconds, a conversion event, like maybe I scrolled a certain distance down the page, or I clicked on a certain button or things like that. That’s an engaged user. And so this is a better measurement. But my beef with that, though, is that we’ve gone from a transactional page view to a transactional event, and it’s still just transactional. At the end of the day, you really still don’t know anything about these people about your audience? who’s visiting your site and why they were engaged. Okay. Why were they engaged? What were they doing? Did they solve their problem? Did they understand your content, all these different factors, Google had such an opportunity for just blowing this out of the park for us gaining insight into our audiences. But it’s still the end of the day. All this is is just a rewritten platform for events. All this really is it didn’t give me any

Ted Jones  08:19

events. Were always there. I mean, you could always define your events that yeah, just pushing them forward and bringing them forward with engagement is probably the big switch here.

John Paul Mains  08:29

Exactly. I was so hopeful that Google, like I’ve been watching GA for well, before it came out and saying, Okay, can we do? Can we get into actually did people understand what I’m doing on the website? And I was really, really, really hopeful. But at the end of the day, it was still all about, did they click something? Did they scroll past something? Did they do something? Right? And engagement rate is better than an engagement rate is definitely better than a bounce rate. But it’s still just a, it’s transactional information. It doesn’t really give me any insights that I can actually use to do much with.

Ted Jones  09:05

Right. Well, yeah, we mentioned we’ve talked about important too, was just understanding our content. You know, it’s such a qualitative type of measure. Now,

John Paul Mains  09:17

I’m not saying that’s easy to do. But there’s still with Google index four, there’s still no way of getting better at that in Insight, which is so so so critical thing. Am I writing good content by writing back is an AI engine AI engine, good content. Hey, I’ve pushed that over to my AI chat. GPT writes all my content for me now, so yeah, anymore.

Ted Jones  09:43

How’s it? How’s it doing? Well, you should ask GPT how your contents doing?

John Paul Mains  09:49

Sure. So, but in case Yeah, I just got out yeah, this was something I just wanted to bring up because I guess we still haven’t solved this core problem in my mind of does somebody understand my content? What should I be doing different? What should How should I be presenting my content? Should I be doing more video content? Should it be running more text content? am I providing the right answer out to my audience? Yeah, that they can actually use? I still can’t get that. Are they? Yeah, they might be engaged. They were they more than 10 seconds. Okay. Right. And maybe

Ted Jones  10:22

engagement, high engagement with low conversion, you know, you need to start adding more call to actions to your page. And, you know, giving them, you know, deeper links into your site. You know, you mentioned someone coming back from just read your blog post, but, you know, what is the product or service you’re offering? And can you give them deeper, but

John Paul Mains  10:45

You have to think through? That’s what you’d have to think through? And it’s, yeah, you can provide great content. But unless you’re guiding somebody to on a journey, Hey, you, I answered your question. But you need to take this next step, you need to do this, oh, you need to buy this product in order to solve your problem. You need to sign up for this email to get to be educated in your space or whatever it may be still, at the end of the day, you have to do something beyond that. But if the content itself doesn’t take that person on that journey, then they’re never going to convert. Yeah, they’re never going to convert. So you still have to be able to answer that quit, be able to discover the answer the question, did my content help somebody? Yes or no? I’ve got a great product. My Content is terrible. They’re not going to convert.

Ted Jones  11:35

Yeah, right. Well, even just, you know, an engagement just being more in 10 seconds. I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m really that engaged.

John Paul Mains  11:49

All the everybody always says, Okay, you got to capture their attention in three seconds. What else can I do inside of 10? Out? Just like 11 seconds? I don’t know. I’m not a speed reader. But yeah. So anyway,

Ted Jones  12:04

one more to dig into with Google Analytics.

John Paul Mains  12:08

Yes, lots and lots of fun. Because yeah, this is the number one analytics platform that’s out there. But at the end of the day, we’ve got still got to figure out how to use it to to our advantage to gain those insights, which we’re hopeful for on answering the question, Does somebody understand my content so that I can get more sales, more conversions more? Whatever it is that I’m wanting? Right, cool. All right, everybody. That is it for today. Please be sure to subscribe where you’re consuming this content, share it with your friends. We would love to see more of y’all here of course, and if you find this information useful, give us a big thumbs up on the content below. All right. Thanks, y’all. Appreciate it.