You are not alone – the difference between types of users confuses everyone.
The quick short answer is: Active users (aka just “Users”) are the number of people who engaged with your site (for that date range). But New users are the number of people who have not visited your site before for that date range.
The big ‘but’ here being – for that date range. The date range can make a big difference to how different these figures are. As well as the type of website and your users.
It’s not uncommon to see 98%+ New users, simply because it’s the kind of site people only visit once in a while. Bear in mind that Google’s ability to track if someone is the same user is dependent on cookies, whether they are logged in to a Google account, and on whether they use different devices or web browsers.
Total Users
- Definition: Total Users refers to the count of unique users who have interacted with your website within a specified date range. This metric includes both new and returning users.
- Key Point: It measures the overall audience size, regardless of their engagement level or frequency of visits during the specified period.
New Users
- Definition: New Users are users who are visiting your website for the first time. GA4 determines this based on a unique identifier (like a client ID from a cookie or a user ID if logged in), and it counts a user as “new” if no prior sessions have been recorded.
- Key Point: This metric helps you understand how many users are discovering your website for the first time within the given timeframe.
Active Users
- Definition: Active Users are users who have engaged with your website in a way that is considered active during the specified date range. An “active” engagement is typically defined by interactions that are more significant than just opening a page. It might include events like transactions, button clicks, or other interactions that GA4 tracks.
- Key Point: This metric focuses on users who are not just visiting but are engaging with your content or products in a meaningful way.
Key Difference between Total Users and Active Users
- Total Users count includes every unique user who has visited your site, offering a broad measure of your audience size. It doesn’t distinguish between users who barely interact with your site and those who engage deeply.
- Active Users, on the other hand, specifically counts users who have taken meaningful actions (beyond just visiting) on your site. Thus providing some measure of engaged or interested users.
How Useful Is This?
While Total Users gives you a sense of your overall audience size, Active Users provides insight into the portion of that audience that is actively engaging with your content. This distinction is crucial for understanding not just how many people are coming to your site, but how many are engaging in a way that could be more meaningful for your marketing objectives.
Of course you should also be tracking key actions that are meaningful for your business too. Form submissions, enquiries, phone calls, optins and conversions are going to tell you a lot more than just how many people saw a page. Setting that stuff up in the GA4 version of Google Analytics is not so easy but it’s worth getting it done. As well as the custom reporting to pull out that data and make it easy to see and use. Get in touch for help with this.