Audiences in GA4

July 6, 2025

Audiences can be very useful in GA4. But like a lot of tools and options in GA4, it can often be underused.

So lets take a look at how best to use audiences within GA4.

So, what’s the big deal about audiences in GA4?

Well, for starters, you can pull them directly into your reports. Imagine adding them as comparisons or filters to really drill down into how different user groups are behaving.

It’s a fantastic way to slice and dice your data, giving you a fresh perspective on user attributes.

For instance, there’s already a dedicated “Audiences” report tucked away in the “User attributes” section, showing you how various audience segments interact with your site.

And yes, you can filter by “audience name” in your standard reports, choosing to include or exclude specific groups.

This means if you’re tracking users from a particular campaign, you can isolate their data with ease.

Two Ways to Build Audiences

Building audiences in GA4 is surprisingly flexible; you’ve got a couple of neat options.

Option 1

The first, and perhaps most straightforward, route is through the ‘Admin’ section. Just click ‘Admin’, then ‘Audiences’, and you’ll see a table – probably with ‘All Users’ and ‘Purchases’ already chilling there.

From there, you simply hit the ‘New Audience’ button and start setting your conditions. Easy peasy, right?

Option 2

But here’s a little gem that I find particularly handy: if you’re already immersed in an exploration, perhaps a free-form report, and you’ve created a segment you’re really keen on, you can simply click “Create an audience.”

GA4 then magically sends that segment over to your audience section. It’s a seamless way to transform a fleeting insight into a persistent audience you can track over time. Two paths, same great destination!

Deeper Dive: Custom Audiences

Let’s focus on building audiences directly within the ‘Admin’ section, shall we?

When you click ‘New Audience’, you’re presented with a smorgasbord of options.

While ‘Custom audience’ is often where the real magic happens, GA4 also offers some pretty neat pre-built templates.

You’ll find general templates, often e-commerce focused, like ‘Non-purchasers’ and ‘Purchasers’ – pretty standard stuff.

Then there are templates based on demographics or technology, letting you get super granular with your audience definitions. Fancy targeting users based on their device or browser? You absolutely can. And for those keen on acquisition, there’s even a template to build audiences based on their first user source.

Predictive Audiences

Now, a really intriguing option is the ‘Predictive audience’. These are automatically generated based on user behaviour, predicting things like future purchases or potential churn. The catch? Your GA4 property needs a fair bit of data before these become available. But once they do, oh, they’re powerful! Imagine identifying users “likely to purchase in the next seven days” and then exporting that audience directly to Google Ads. You could significantly increase your bids for these high-intent users, knowing your return on investment is likely to be much, much greater. It’s like having a crystal ball for your ad spend!

Getting Granular: Building a Custom Audience, Step-by-Step

So, how do we build one of these custom audiences? Let’s say we want to target female users aged 25 to 34 who arrived via organic search. Here’s how you’d set that up:

First, give your audience a clear, descriptive name – something like “Female 25-34 Organic Search.” If multiple people are using the GA4 property, adding a short description is honestly a brilliant idea. It saves so much confusion later on.

Next, you’ve got your main options: ‘Include users’ or ‘Exclude users’. You can exclude temporarily or permanently, which is brilliant for A/B testing or filtering out internal traffic. There’s also a ‘sequence’ option, though it’s not relevant for our current example. But just for a moment, consider its power: you could build an audience of users who first land on a blog post and then visit a demo booking page, all within the same session or even across multiple sessions. You can even set time constraints – say, within 30 minutes. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

For our “Female 25-34 Organic Search” audience, we’d choose ‘Include users when…’. Then, we’d add our conditions:

Gender: Exactly matches ‘Female’.
Age: Is one of ’25-34′.
First user default channel group: Exactly matches ‘Organic Search’.

Even if you don’t see many users initially (especially in a test property), GA4 will look back over the last 30 days and populate your audience. From then on, any user fitting those conditions will be added automatically. You can set the maximum duration for audience membership, anywhere from 30 days to 18 months (540 days). Once you’re happy, just hit ‘Save’, and your audience is ready to start gathering data.

Audience Trigger

Here’s where things get really interesting, and frankly, a bit game-changing: audience triggers.

When you create a new audience from scratch, you’ll spot an option to “Add an audience trigger.” What does this mean? Well, you can log an additional event every time an audience membership refreshes.

Imagine this scenario: a user comes to your site, makes a purchase over £100, leaves, and then returns the next day and does the same. If you’ve set up an audience trigger for “Purchases Over £100” and enabled logging an additional event, that second purchase will count as another event. This isn’t just about counting; it’s about understanding.

Let me give you a couple of real-world examples I absolutely love:

High-Value Purchasers

You could create an audience for “Purchases Over £100”. The conditions would be simple: ‘Include users when the purchase event has a value over 100’. Set an audience trigger, name the event purchase_over_100, and save it. Now, whenever someone makes a high-value purchase, this new event is sent to your reports.

Why is this useful?

Think about it. You might know a particular marketing channel drives a lot of revenue.

But with this trigger, you can see which channels are driving high-value revenue.

Perhaps your organic search brings in more purchases over £100 than your paid campaigns.

This insight can help you reallocate your budget, focusing on areas where your return on investment is demonstrably greater.

Content to Conversion: Proving Your Blog’s Worth

Are you spending loads of time on blog content? And, dare I ask, are you struggling to show its direct value to clients or the wider team? An audience trigger can fix that.

Create an audience called “Blog Then Purchase.” Set it up as a sequence, within the same session:

Step 1: Landing page and query string contains ‘blog’.
Step 2: Followed by a ‘purchase’ event.

Now, create an audience trigger for this, perhaps blog_then_purchase.

You can confidently tell your stakeholders, “Look, X amount of users who land on our blog then go on to make a purchase within the same session.”

You can even drill down further and say, “This specific blog post is driving the most conversions!”

This is incredibly powerful for demonstrating content ROI, helping you focus on what truly works.

And hey, it doesn’t even have to be a purchase; it could be any conversion event you’ve defined, like a demo booking or a PDF download.

(Not Set) Issue

A little warning though – many have found that creating audience triggers can have a impact on increasing the number of instances of (not set).

It might be worth marking an annotation in GA4 so you can keep track of how an audience trigger impacts (not set).

Triggering Audience Triggers cannot be created using demographic data.

Seeing It in Action: Reports and Beyond

Once you’ve set up these audience triggers, where do you find this goldmine of data?

Head over to the ‘Reports’ section in GA4.

You can look at the ‘Event count’ and filter by the specific event name you created, like purchase_over_100 or blog_then_purchase. Alternatively, you can dive into the ‘Engagement’ section, then ‘Events’, and again, filter to get the granularity you need.

Using audiences and creating these event triggers really adds another layer to your data analysis. It’s not just about what happened, but who it happened to and how they got there. It helps you understand your users’ interactions on a much deeper level.

So, I really encourage you to start brainstorming. What audience triggers could you create? Are there specific sequences of actions that reveal high intent? Are there certain metric thresholds that indicate a valuable user?

Build them out, start tracking, and prepare to uncover some seriously useful insights.

Conclusion

So there we have it – the magic of audiences – start utilising them today!

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Author

Hello, I'm Kyle Rushton McGregor!

I’m an experienced GA4 Specialist with a demonstrated history of working with Google Tag Manager and Looker Studio. I’m an international speaker who has trained 1000s of people on all things analytics.