[GA4] Understand user metrics

Google Analytics offers a few user metrics that provide different ways of understanding how many people visit your website or app.

Differences at a glance

The following core user metrics are used to define how many people visit your site or app:

• "Total users" is the total number of people who visited your site or app in the specified date range.
• "Active users" is the number of people who engaged with your site or app in the specified date range.
• "New users" is the number of people who have never visited your site or app before in the specified date range.
• "Returning users" is the number of people who have visited your site or app before in the specified date range.

It's important to note that not all new users are active, so new users may exceed active users. While new and active users won’t exceed total users, factors such as thresholding may contribute to discrepancies in these numbers. In Google Analytics, you'll only see active users in your reporting, but both active and inactive users will show in exports to Google Ads. Learn more About data thresholds.

Differences in depth

The following table provides the definition for each of these user metrics:

Metric	What it is	How it's populated
Total users	The number of unique users who triggered any event in the specified date range. An event is triggered when the criteria for an event is met. For example, an event trigger can be set so that if someone makes a purchase, the text 'purchase' populates the dimension.	This metric is populated automatically.
New users	The number of new unique users who logged the first_open or first_visit event in the specified date range.	This metric is populated automatically.
Active users	The number of unique users who engaged with your site or app in the specified date range. An active user is any user who has an engaged session or when Analytics collects: the first_visit event or engagement_time_msec parameter from a website the first_open event or engagement_time_msec parameter from an Android app the first_open or user_engagement event from an iOS app The user is considered an active user as soon as the user_engagement event is detected within a second.	This metric is populated automatically.
Returning users	The number of unique users who initiated at least one previous session, regardless of whether or not the previous session was an engaged session, in the specified date range. An engaged session is a session that lasted 10 seconds or longer, or had 1 or more conversion events or 2 or more page or screen views.	This metric is populated automatically.

Note: Sometimes users are counted in only one category. For example, this can happen when a user who has already opened a site before, opens the site again, but stays on the site for less than 10 seconds without being active on the page. In such a scenario, the user doesn’t meet any of the criteria for being active, and will only be counted in the total user count, but not in the active users count.