What is a GA4 audience?
In simple terms an audience is a group of users that you want to monitor based on any combination of interactions in a given timeframe. The audience allows you to segment the users based on events, dimensions and metrics important to a business.
Examples:
Mobile audience : users who visited the website on a mobile device
Purchasers : users who make a purchase.
GA4 evaluates if a user belongs to an audience group based on the criteria that is set up, if a user qualifies they are added. If they no longer meet a criteria they are also automatically removed. A user that satisfies the conditions of multiple audience groups will be included in all of them (Read more here)
By default, Google automatically creates two audiences for you ‘All users’ and ‘Purchasers’.
In order for Searchspring to collect and track site specific search activity you need to create a custom audience that captures and satisfies certain criteria.
Before we begin ensure you have enabled site search on your Google account.
How to Setup GA4 audience for Searchspring.
These steps need to be followed in the order listed, once the configurations for an audience is saved they cannot be modified. Please read the instructions carefully to avoid errors
*please note that once an audience is set up it can take up to 24 hours for google to start collecting and reporting on the data (Read more here).
Watch Video Tutorial
Login to your Google Analytics account
Navigate to Audience Settings in Google Analytics
Select the ‘Admin’ settings on the bottom left of your screen. This should open up a view where you can view your GA4 property then select ‘Audiences’ under the property you are using.
Select "New Audience"
Select "Create a custom audience" named 'searchspring'
When you create a custom audience for Searchspring it is important to follow the naming convention provided so that Searchspring can detect and pull the required data.
Use the name ‘searchspring’ (lowercase) - please ensure there are no spaces before, after or in between when typing in the audience name.
When setting up an audience you need to define the scope, event, dimension, or metric that you would like to apply
Scope : This defines the scope of when conditions will be met
- Across all sessions - adds a user to the audience if the condition is true for all the previous sessions
- Within the same session - adds a user to the audience if the condition is true for the current session (live session)
- Single event - adds the user to the audience if the condition is true for a particular event
Please select ‘Within the same session’
Next, we need to set up the event that we will use as a criteria for the 'searchspring' audience. By default, GA4 fires the ‘view_search_results’ event when a user inputs a query and clicks on the search button on the website. As the event gets fired on the website, Google sends some default parameters like search_term, page_location and source.
Set membership duration on the right hand side as 1 days, this means we will capture the search activity as it happens each day and report on it.
Next step is to add a sequence
Sequences let you specify the conditions that need to be met for a user to become a member of this audience. In our case we would like to know the activity that triggered a purchase as a result of search on the website.
It is important to keep the scope the same as before ‘Within the same session’ - in BOTH drop downs.
Under "Add new condition" select purchase from the dropdown under Events
Please check all the highlighted settings before saving, these cannot be edited after the audience is created.
Once you've completed the steps above you can click ‘Save’. The newly created 'searchspring' custom audience will now be available in the audience list in your analytics account.
Note: If you notice an error in the audience after saving, you can delete the audience and recreate it.
Once you have successfully created an audience follow the next step to update your Searchspring management console to use your GA4 data
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