Analytics audiences as retargeting

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Different filters and UI If you’ve logged into Universal Analytics and GA4, you’ll see major changes to the interface (which, like many aspects of GA4, not everyone loves). Additionally, there are several different ways to filter data that will deviate from interface to interface. I’ll use a specific example to demonstrate how you can get tripped up here. To quickly get at overall organic traffic in Universal Analytics, you could go to Audience > Overview, then segment for organic traffic: UA - organic traffic overview In GA4, getting to a similar quick view of a top-line organic traffic trend may look something like this: GA4 - organic traffic overview But this is a different metric (first user medium) and a different filter (contains organic – which works for this property but may not for a site with organic social traffic, etc.

Some of the views or reports you were used to in UA may only be available as “Explorations,” a reporting suite within GA4 that includes: Funnel explorations. Path explorations. “Free form” reports (a replacement for “custom reports” in UA). This may be your ticket to recreating some of the views and reports you DB to Data accustomed to in UA (or at least a close approximation). Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on. Business email address Get Search Engine Land in your inbox. See terms. 3. Data thresholding in GA4 Data threshholding in GA4 GA4 data may seem to be completely missing or dramatically under-reported in certain views for certain actions (visitors, specific events, etc.) when a user drills down to a specific level.



This is a common point of confusion, particularly for small to medium-sized sites looking at granular levels of data. According to Google: “If your report or exploration is missing data, it may be because Google Analytics has applied a data threshold. Data thresholds are applied to prevent anyone viewing a report or exploration from inferring the identity of individual users based on demographics, interests, or other signals present in the data.” If you want to avoid thresholding, here are your options: Disable Google Signals: There are pros and cons to using Signals, but a big con is that it enables this kind of thresholding. The main pros are: It will start populating demographic data in GA4. It lets you reuse Google audiences in Google Ads (thus, you can show more targeted ads to them).