GA4 and advertising campaigns: the guide to finally measuring what really matters

You launch campaigns, you look at your ad platform dashboards and you see clicks. But do you really know what those visitors do once they’re on your site? How many convert? On which pages do they drop off? GA4 is the tool that answers these questions — provided you know where to look and how to configure it for your campaigns. This guide gives you the keys, straight to the point.

What really changed with GA4 and why it matters for advertisers

If you’ve experienced Universal Analytics (UA), GA4 can seem confusing at first. The change is not cosmetic — it’s a complete overhaul of the data model.

From the sessions/pageviews model to the event-based model

In Universal Analytics, everything was organised around sessions: one visit = one session, with a number of pageviews inside it. In GA4, the basic unit is the event. Every interaction — click, scroll, video play, add to cart, form submission — is a distinct event, measurable and exploitable independently.

For an advertiser, this is a fundamental change: you can now precisely track what your visitors do at every stage of their journey, not just how many pages they viewed during their session.

The end of bounce rate, the rise of engagement rate

GA4 replaces the bounce rate with the engagement rate: a session is considered “engaged” if it lasts more than 10 seconds, triggers a conversion event, or includes at least two pageviews. This is a far more representative measure of the actual quality of your traffic — particularly useful for evaluating campaigns that generate short but intentional visits, such as push notifications.

💡 Adrena’tips: GA4 automatically collects a series of automatic events by default (first_visit, session_start, scroll, external link click…). You don’t need to configure everything manually, but you absolutely must define your custom conversion events so that GA4 knows what matters to you.

The essential GA4 reports for analysing your campaigns

GA4 offers a fairly dense interface. Here are the five reports you absolutely need to know to track your advertising performance, with their exact location in the interface.

GA4 Report	Where to find it	What you’ll find there
User acquisition	Reports → Acquisition → Overview	Which sources bring in the most new users
Session acquisition	Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition	Which channels generate the most sessions — with source/medium/campaign
Engagement and conversions	Reports → Engagement → Events	Which key events are triggered after a campaign click
Pages and screens	Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens	Which pages are visited post-click and for how long
Funnel exploration	Explore → Funnel exploration	Visualise the complete journey from notification to conversion

💡 Adrena’tips: the “Explore → Funnel exploration” report is often under-used. Yet it is the most powerful for an advertiser: it allows you to visualise exactly where a visitor from a campaign abandons their journey, step by step.

Setting up UTMs correctly: the absolute foundation of any analysis

Without UTMs, GA4 cannot distinguish between your campaigns. All advertising traffic risks landing in the catch-all category “(direct) / (none)”, making any analysis impossible. UTM parameters are the tags you add to your URLs to tell GA4 where each visitor comes from.

The 5 UTM parameters and their role

UTM Parameter	Role	Web Push example	Required?
utm_source	Identifies the traffic source	adrenalead	☑ Yes
utm_medium	Identifies the marketing channel	webpush	☑ Yes
utm_campaign	Campaign name	summer-sale-2025	☑ Yes
utm_content	Content variant (A/B)	red-promo-visual	Recommended
utm_term	Keyword or targeted segment	abandoned-cart-segment	Optional

Naming errors that ruin your reports

⚠️ Common mistake: GA4 is case-sensitive: “WebPush”, “webpush” and “WEBPUSH” are three different sources in your reports. Adopt a strict convention using lowercase, no spaces, with hyphens as separators, and apply it across all your teams and suppliers.

• Never use spaces in UTM values (use hyphens instead)
• Never mix upper and lower case on the same parameter
• Do not reuse the same campaign name for different campaigns
• Document your naming convention in a shared file accessible to the whole team

Measuring a Web Push campaign in GA4: a concrete use case

Web Push is an excellent case study for illustrating the power of UTM tracking in GA4: it is a channel that generates direct traffic, without third-party cookies, fully traceable via URL parameters.

How to tag your Web Push notifications

Each push notification contains a destination URL. Simply add your UTM parameters to it so that GA4 can precisely identify this traffic. With a platform like Adrenalead, the UTM fields are natively integrated into the campaign creation interface: you fill in the source, medium and campaign at the time of writing your notification, and the link is automatically tagged.

🔍 Concrete example: Destination URL without UTM: https://mysite.com/summer-offer Destination URL with UTM: https://mysite.com/summer-offer?utm_source=adrenalead&utm_medium=webpush&utm_campaign=summer-sale-2025&utm_content=red-promo-visual

Which events to track in GA4 for a push campaign

Once the push traffic is identified in GA4, you can track its behaviour with precision. Here are the events to configure as conversions according to your objective:

• E-commerce: purchase, add_to_cart, begin_checkout
• Lead generation: form_submit, generate_lead, sign_up
• Media / publisher: scroll (75%), session_engaged, page_view on N pages
• Cart abandonment: begin_checkout without purchase in the same session

How to isolate push traffic in your GA4 reports

In the “Traffic acquisition” report, filter by “Source / Medium” = “adrenalead / webpush”. You get a dedicated view of your push traffic: sessions, engagement rate, conversions, revenue — directly comparable to your other channels (email, paid search, social).

💡 Adrena’tips: create a custom segment in GA4 (Explore → Segments) filtering on utm_source = adrenalead and utm_medium = webpush. You can then apply this segment to any exploration report for advanced cross-analysis.

The 3 analysis errors that skew your decisions

Error #1: relying solely on last-click

By default, GA4 uses a data-driven attribution model, but many advertisers continue to think in last-click terms. The result: upper-funnel channels — including Web Push, often used for intent retargeting — are undervalued because they are not the last touchpoint before conversion.

Consult the “Advertising → Attribution → Attribution paths” report to see the real contribution of each channel across the full journey. You can also use “Advertising → Attribution → Model comparison” to compare data-driven attribution with other models side by side.

Error #2: conversion windows that are too short

GA4 allows you to configure attribution windows of up to 90 days. By default, this window is 30 days for acquisition events and 90 days for other conversion events. For a product with a long purchase cycle (credit, insurance, B2B…), check that these settings accurately reflect the reality of your customer journey. You’ll find them under Admin → Data display → Attribution settings.

Error #3: confusing users and sessions

A single user can generate multiple sessions. If you compare campaigns based on sessions without normalising per user, you risk overvaluing channels that generate multiple return visits. In GA4, the “active users” metric is the default reference: it only counts users who have had at least one engaged session (minimum 10 seconds, a conversion, or two pageviews). This is a more reliable basis for comparison than the raw session count when assessing the true reach of your campaigns.

In summary: what to remember and do right now

• Configure your conversion events in GA4 before launching any campaign, to avoid flying blind
• Adopt a strict UTM convention, documented and shared with the whole team
• Use the “Explore → Funnel exploration” report to precisely identify where your visitors drop off
• Compare your channels using “active users”, not sessions, for reliable benchmarks
• Look at multi-touch conversion paths before cutting a channel that appears to underperform on last-click

GA4 only measures well what you ask it to measure. Take the time to configure it for your objectives, and your campaigns will finally tell you what they are really worth.

What is the difference between “sessions” and “active users” in GA4 for analysing my campaigns?

Sessions count the number of visits, whether they come from the same user or not. Active users, on the other hand, only count people who have genuinely interacted with your site: at least 10 seconds spent on the page, a conversion completed, or two pages visited. To compare the true effectiveness of your campaigns, always think in terms of active users rather than raw sessions — you’ll avoid overestimating channels that generate many return visits from the same visitor.

Why don’t my GA4 data match the figures shown in my advertising platform?

This is a very common situation, caused primarily by differences in attribution models. Your ad platform often works on a last-click basis, while GA4 uses a data-driven model by default that distributes credit across multiple touchpoints. Add to this the different attribution windows, cookie blockers and cross-device conversions that are not always reconciled. To align the two, set up your UTMs rigorously and compare models under Advertising → Attribution → Model comparison.

How do I know if my attribution window is correctly configured in GA4?

Go to Admin → Data display → Attribution settings. GA4 applies a default window of 30 days for acquisition events and 90 days for other conversions. If your purchase cycle is long — credit, insurance, B2B, real estate — check that these values accurately reflect your customer journey. A window that is too short means you are missing conversions attributable to your campaigns and undervaluing certain channels.