Google Analytics Audit Test #

134

Too High Engagement Rate to Be Useful

Why It Matters:

Critical to understanding website behavior.

Industries:

All

Checks For:

Utility

How powerful is your current implementation?

Insight Category:

Behavior

Can you tell what visitors are doing?

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Background

A GA4 audit is essential for uncovering missing insights—key data points that organizations don't yet know and can act upon. A well-done audit evaluates both behavioral tracking and traffic attribution, ensuring each is accurate and useful. It also assesses whether the data collected truly supports business decisions and reporting.

Test Detail

This test detects suspiciously high engagement rates—typically above 90–95% across a large volume of sessions—which can indicate a broken or overly loose engagement definition. In Google Analytics, a session is considered engaged if it meets at least one of the following:

  • Lasts longer than 10 seconds
  • Contains 1 or more conversion events
  • Contains 2 or more pageviews or screenviews

If nearly all sessions are classified as engaged, it may be due to:

  • Engagement time thresholds being lowered
  • Events firing automatically on every session (e.g., scroll, click, engagement marked on load)
  • Site configuration that prevents proper session exit detection
  • Inclusion of bot or internal traffic

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How to Conduct This Test

Basic Tests

  • In Google Analytics > Reports > Engagement > Overview, check the sitewide Engagement Rate
  • If it's consistently above ~90%, this may signal a data quality issue
  • In Explore, create a Free-form report:
    • Dimensions: Session default channel group, Landing page, Device category
    • Metrics: Engagement rate, Sessions
    • Filter for high-traffic segments to see if the pattern holds across all traffic or just certain sources

Advanced QA

  • In BigQuery, you can query average session engagement metrics:
    SELECT
      COUNT(*) AS total_sessions,
      COUNTIF(engaged_session = 1) AS engaged_sessions,
      COUNTIF(engaged_session = 1) / COUNT(*) AS engagement_rate
    FROM `your_dataset.events_*`
    WHERE event_name = 'session_start';
  • If the engagement rate is abnormally high across all or most sessions, the data may be overstated and unhelpful.

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How To Fix

  • Review what events might be auto-firing and qualifying as engagement:
    • Scroll, click, file downloads, video plays—are these triggering too early or too often?
  • Check your conversion settings in Google Analytics:
    • Are events marked as conversions inflating the session classification?
  • Ensure Google Analytics isn’t double-counting sessions or using custom code that modifies session length or behavior
  • Use Google Analytics DebugView to trace session event flow and see what qualifies a session as engaged
  • Consider revisiting your engagement time threshold or refining which events should count toward session engagement
  • Hire a pro to fine-tune your engagement tracking so your metrics reflect meaningful user behavior—not inflated signals.

Tips from a Google Analytics Consultant

Focus on Insights

Every Google Analytics audit should result in a plan for more insights.

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An insight is:

  • something you don't know
  • and can act on to improve performance

The Goal

Identify and remove insight blockers. Don't get tempted to track things you can't act on!

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