Have you been using Google Analytics 4 (GA4)? If so, you might be excited to learn about a new metric that’s been added to help you measure user engagement and the quality of the traffic you’re sending from your marketing channels: User Key Event Rate.

What is the user key event rate?

The user key event rate tells you the percentage of visitors to your website or app who complete a specific important action, known as a key event. This could be anything from making a purchase to signing up for a newsletter. In this example below, I’ve selected “Submit Footer Form” as my key event in the dropdown to show you the conversion rate of this event. From this data, I can ascertain that Organic Video drives the highest conversion rate for this action, followed by PPC (Paid Search) and SEO (Organic Search). Now, YouTube isn’t one of our primary organic channels that we’d often spend a lot of time on versus our other channels. However, discovering this, we may reconsider its importance in our overall digital marketing mix! 

If you want to take a look at this new metric for yourself, you’ll find User Key Event Rate in the “User Acquisition” and “Traffic Acquisition” reports by default – simply scroll along to the right side. This means you don’t need to do any fancy configuration to start tracking this valuable data.

If you would like to assess whether your User Key Event Rate is performing well for you in terms of your core KPIs (conversions), here’s some website conversion rate benchmarks you can use to get an estimate of your performance from Geckoboard: 

Why is the user key event rate important?

As we’ve demonstrated, understanding the user key event rate gives you valuable insights into how well your website or app is converting visitors into engaged users. Here are a couple of reasons why it’s important:

• Measure campaign effectiveness: The user key event rate can help you assess the success of your marketing campaigns. By comparing the user key event rate across different campaigns, you can see which ones are driving the most valuable actions on your site.
• Identify areas for improvement: A low user key event rate might indicate that something on your website or app needs improvement. You can use this metric to identify areas where users might be dropping off before completing a key event.
• Overall, the user key event rate is a useful default addition to GA4 that can help you understand how users interact with your site and make data-driven decisions to improve their experience.