Glossary

Active Users (GA4)

Active users is GA4's primary user metric: the number of distinct people who had an engaged session or fired a first-visit/engagement event in the period. It replaced Universal Analytics' 'users' as the default headcount of your website audience.

How to read it

Next to ads data, active users show whether paid clicks turn into real site visitors; a persistent gap between clicks and users hints at tracking or landing page issues.

Where it misleads

Cookie consent and ad blockers make GA4 undercount, especially in the EU. GA4 numbers are a floor, not an exact count.

Related terms

Sessions (GA4) →

A session is one visit to your website: it starts when a user arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. One user can have many sessions. Sessions measure visit volume, the standard unit for 'how much traffic did the campaign send?'.

Page Views (GA4) →

Page views count every time a page on your site is loaded or reloaded. They measure raw content consumption: which pages get seen, how deep visitors go. Divided by sessions, they show how many pages a typical visit covers.

Engagement Rate (GA4) →

Engagement rate is the share of sessions that were 'engaged': lasted over 10 seconds, had a key event, or included at least two page views. It's GA4's inverse of the old bounce rate: it measures how many visits showed any real interaction.

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