Seeing Analytics

Active Users

Active users are the people who engaged with your site in the period. They're what the Users column in your reports shows, and they're not everyone who visited.

2,241

Active users · 1 Nov 2020

124 counted only in Total users.

Active users = Users in reports

Total users 2,365

On a website, GA4 counts a user as active if any one of three things happened:

  • A first_visit event. The user is new in the period.
  • An engaged session. At least one of their sessions was engaged.
  • Engagement time. GA4 collected an engagement_time_msec parameter, even for a second with the page in front.

One is enough. A new visitor who leaves after a second is active. A returning visitor who closes the page at once is not.

On 1 November 2020, Google's Merchandise Store had 2,365 Total users and 2,241 Active users. The other 124 came back for an instant and met none of the three.

The bar puts each user in the first condition they meet, in this order. Many new users also had an engaged session, but each user counts once.

Google notes that New users can sometimes exceed Active users in reports. Factors such as data thresholds can also make the numbers disagree.

So when a report says Users, read Active users. To count everyone who sent an event, add the Total users metric.

Data: Google's GA4 sample from the Merchandise Store, 1 November 2020, exact counts from BigQuery.

Check yourself

  1. Does the Users column in GA4 reports show Total users?

  2. Is a new visitor who leaves after one second an active user?

  3. Is a returning visitor who closes the page at once an active user?