User Engagement in GA4

What Is User Engagement?

User engagement is a metric that is event-scoped and measures the amount of time a user spends actively engaging with your website or app when they are visiting your website or using your app. It refers to the total amount of time that a visitor stays on your website.

In contrast to UA, Google Analytics 4 prioritizes user engagement to determine if your website's or app's content is relevant and useful to visitors. It has direct effects on important metrics such as engagement rate, return rate, and others.

GA4 User Engagement

Actively engaged sessions are the main focus of user engagement. For instance, a person first visited your website in a new tab, but they did not actively view anything on your screen. As a result of this, GA4 will only count visitors who are actively viewing something on your screen.

If there is engagement time, GA4 tracks a user_engagement event with a parameter called engagement_time_msec.

Time is counted from the moment a user starts a new session and GA4 starts keeping record user_engagement.

When one of the following occurs, the timer stops and the amount of time passed (in milliseconds) is sent to GA4:

• The user focuses on a different page in the browser.
• The website either crashes or the user closes the tab.

How Does User Engagement Event Works?

The user_engagement event will fire when a session becomes engaged.

An engaged session happens if any of the following conditions are met:

• The duration of the session exceeds 10 seconds (though you can adjust this session time).
• The session contains at least one conversion.
• The session has 2 further page views.

As shown in the screenshot below from the Events reporting, there are 4,602 user_engagement events that occurred, but only 1,335 users were involved in these events.

GA4 user_engagement event

Here, the number of events counts exceeds the number of total users. The reason for this is that when a person leaves a page of engaged session, the user_engagement event fires again.

Take a closer look at Google's explanation on user engagement :

What Are User Engagement Metrics in GA4?

Your content must be very relevant to the search query to have such a high engagement rate . You can compare engagement rates across multiple pages, channels, and dimensions.

Here are the most important engagement metrics and their descriptions: