There’s nothing like an example to explain something complicated like understanding reported GA4 audiences user counts. Consider this example where GA4 is used to track activity on a digital property and GA4 audiences have been defined:
- GA4 audience name A inclusion is defined by taking action X, with max duration membership.
- GA4 audience name B inclusion is defined by NOT taking action X, with max duration membership.
- On day 1 a user visits the related digital property, but does not take action X. The user is added to audience name B.
- On day 3 the same user visits again, but this time the user does take action X. Now the users is added to audience name A.
The GA4 audiences report will show user counts that satisfy inclusion criteria for a given GA4 audience name during the date range selected. The following reporting scenarios show how data related to the above example would be reported for various report dates:
- Date range = day 1, audience name A will report 0 users, and audience B will report 1 user.
- Date range = days 1 + 2, audience A will report 0 users, and audience B will report 1 user.
- Date range = days 1 + 2 + 3, audience A will report 1 user, and audience B will report 1 user.
GA4 audience reporting user counts can be confusing as the same user can be reported as associated with more than one audience depending on the reported date range.
GA4 audience scoping matters
When adding include or exclude conditions for a GA4 audience, condition scoping makes a big difference. Condition scoping options include “Across all sessions“, “Within the same session“, and “Within the same event“. Combined with membership duration, these condition scoping options behave very differently when GA4 determines whether or not a user is still included in an audience.
For example, consider an example scenario where your include condition scope is “Across all sessions”, the include condition requires a specific user action (e.g., recording a specific event), and a membership duration of 3 days is applied.
If a user visits the digital property on day 1 and executes the inclusion action, they are added to the audience. If they visit the digital property again on day 3, even if they do not execute the specific inclusion action, their membership clock resets and they remain in the audience for another 3 days.
GA4 advertising segments are different
An GA4 advertising segment is the list of users in Google Analytics that are synced with Google Advertising products for use in remarketing and ads personalization. Advertising segment user counts are different from counts in the GA4 audiences report. While a segment name matches its corresponding audience name, users associated with a segment name are retroactively calculated, and a segment only includes users per their latest audience memberships.
Also, segment size counts reported in GA4 include this disclaimer:
Size can be used to estimate the reach of your advertising segment, based on the last 30 days.
The minimum size requirement to serve your ads varies based on the target network. Learn more about advertising segment size.
0 means that your segment can’t be reached on this network at this time. It may have a size of 0, be incompatible, or still populating in Google Ads.