Retro-working this series with this post as monitoring trends is, in my opinion, key to metrics in general and specifically to the transition to GA4.
If you set up GA4 to mirror your previous analytics account, you will have data that goes back at least 6 months. This is important, because now is the time to review the new metrics in GA4 and apply these to your KPIs.
As several things are measured differently in GA4 it is not a case of simply, ´what does GA4 call it´ but in many cases change the KPI.
One example is bounce rate and session time. Whereas bounce used to be anyone who left the page immediately – GA4 measures bounce as ¨the opposite of the engagement rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. In other words, engagement rate helps you measure the percentage of visits to your website or app that involved some form of meaningful engagement.¨
Which means your bounce rate suddenly went down. But wait – how? Why? This is why you need to look at the previous months and identify the trend. We are resetting our medians with this. If the bounce rate in GA4 is around 25% each month then you know that is your median and you can decide what a goal for this could be.
Session time is similar. This a very painful change for companies who rely on thought leadership blogs for example as reading time suddenly drops. GA4 measures all of this differently and although the jury is still out many people are applauding the new engagement time.
Again to determine this for yourself and your business you need to go back and see what the trend has been.
If you don´t fancy some funky forensic KPIs (copyright me on that term) – hire a professional. But remember measure everything always in order to benchmark growth.
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