Mall Maverick GA4 Series: How do I use GA4? Part 2
In this article, we will show you how to use the Engagement Overview Report and how to track your Bounce & Engagement Rate with Google Analytics 4. These metrics will help you effectively track your Shopping Center website analytics.
Engagement Overview Report
The Engagement overview report is made up of individual cards (each of the sections on the Engagement Overview page) that summarize engagement data on your Shopping Mall website.
By default, Google Analytics populates the report with the most useful cards, however you can customize the cards that appear here so that they are tailored for your Marketing goals. Learn more here.
View the Report
Sign in to your Google Analytics.
From the left menu, select Reports.
On the left, click Engagement > Engagement overview.
Adjust the Date Range
By default, all the cards in the report show data for your Retail Center website for the last 28 days. You can adjust the date range using the dropdown in the top right of the report. Adjusting the date range updates the data for all the cards in the report.
Engagement Time Overview
The overview card summarizes important metrics about engagement time and sessions on your Shopping Mall website.
This card includes the below metrics:
Average engagement time: The average time that your Shopping Center website was in focus in a user's browser.
Average engagement time per session: The average engagement time divided by the number of sessions.
Engaged sessions per user: The average number of engaged sessions per user.
Engaged sessions is the number of sessions that lasted 10 seconds or longer.
Users in Last 30 Minutes
This is a great way to get a quick glimpse of your most popular pages. This card shows the 5 pages on your Shopping Center website with the most users in the past 30 minutes. You can hover over a bar in the chart to see the number of users at each minute in the past 30 minutes, or click View real time to open the Real time report.
Views and Event Overview
The overview card summarizes important metrics about views and event count on your Shopping Center website.
This card includes the following metrics:
Views: The number of pages your users saw on your Shopping Center website
Event count: The number of times users triggered an event (i.e page scroll, page view, download file etc)
Event Count by Event Name
This section shows the number of times users triggered each event in the specified time frame, showing the most frequently triggered events first.
For example, in the table below, the “page_view” and “session_start” were the most frequently triggered events.
Views by Page Title and Screen Class
This card shows the number of times users viewed the most frequently visited pages or screen on your Shopping Center website. This is another great way of seeing how your Marketing efforts are affecting your campaigns.
For example, in the following table, the Home and Shopping Cart pages were the most frequently viewed pages. You could click View pages and screens to open the Pages and screens report.
User activities over time
Google breaks your active users into different time frames so you can easily see how many users visited your Shopping Center site in that period.
1-Day Active Users: Distinct users who visited your Shopping Center website over the past day, including the last day in the report range. This is synonymous with the term “Active users.”
7-Day Active Users: Distinct users who have visited your Shopping Center site over the past 7 days, including the last day in the report range.
30-Day Active Users: Distinct users who have visited your Shopping Center site over the past 30 days, including the last day in the report range.
User Stickiness
User stickiness refers to users based on how frequently they access your Shopping Mall website. In particular, this chart looks at how many users visit your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This chart also provides you with ratios to make easy comparisons. These ratios include:
Daily active users (DAU) / Monthly active users (MAU).
Daily active users (DAU) / Weekly active users (WAU).
Weekly active users (WAU) / Monthly active users (MAU).
This is a great way to quickly see how changes and new Marketing efforts are affecting your visitors and how loyal they are to your Retail/Shopping Center brand.
Bounce and Engagement Rate
You can use the Engagement rate and Bounce rate metrics to measure engagement on your Retail Center website and see how your Marketing efforts are affecting your site.
The Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions. This metric shows you the number of engaged sessions divided by the total number of sessions over a specified time period.
The Bounce rate metric shows you the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. Bounce rate is the inverse of Engagement rate.
To add the two metrics to the Pages and screens report:
On the top right of the report, click Customize report.
In the REPORT DATA section, click Metrics.
3. Select the Engagement rate and Bounce rate metrics.
4. Click Apply and save the changes to the current report
You can follow the same steps for most other reports. The Engagement rate and Bounce rate will now appear in your report.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for a tutorial video coming soon!
Author: Ardalan Amiri
Biography: Ardalan is the Director of Operational Success at Mall Maverick. He has his bachelor’s in Information Technology and has worked in the technology industry for over 10 years. He has extensive knowledge of digital marketing in the Retail Industry and has helped in delivering the successful launch of over 200 Shopping Center Websites and Directory Boards. This includes Web Development, Google Analytics, SEO and training clients on becoming experts with the Mall Maverick dashboard.