Which Of The Three Conversion Metrics in GA4 Are You Using — And Do You Know the Difference?

A client ran regular A/B tests on landing pages. They used GA4 to compare performance — but got three different answers:

• One report said Variant A won
• Another said B performed better
• A third said they were about equal

Why? Each report used a different metric: Conversions, User Conversion Rate, and Session Conversion Rate.

They look similar — but they’re fundamentally different.

GA4 offers three key conversion metrics:

• Conversions — total number of conversion events
• User Conversion Rate — % of users who converted at least once
• Session Conversion Rate — % of sessions with at least one conversion

And in reality:

• A user can have multiple sessions
• One session can include multiple conversions
• A user may convert later — not during the first session

If you don’t know which metric you're looking at, it’s easy to misinterpret the data. It looked like data-driven testing — but was really metric roulette.

Now, I always clarify:

• Are we comparing users, sessions, or event count?
• I compare the same metric across all test variants
• I include formulas under charts in BI dashboards
• And I always try to make all the calculations in BigQuery

GA4 is powerful — but it won’t warn you when you’re mixing metrics and drawing the wrong conclusion from the right-looking chart.

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