How to Create a Custom Audience for Athos on Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – Athos Search & Product Discovery

What is a GA4 audience?

In simple terms, an "audience" is a group of users that you want to monitor based on any combination of interactions in a given timeframe. The audience allows you to segment the users based on events, dimensions and metrics important to a business.

Examples:

Mobile audience = Users who visited the website on a mobile device
Purchasers = Users who make a purchase

GA4 evaluates if a user belongs to an audience group based on the criteria that is set up, if a user qualifies they are added. If they no longer meet a criteria they are also automatically removed. A user that satisfies the conditions of multiple audience groups will be included in all of them (Read more here)

By default, Google automatically creates two audiences for you: "All users" and "Purchasers".

To allow Athos Commerce to collect and track site specific search activity, you will need to create a custom audience that captures and satisfies certain criteria.

Before you begin, ensure that you have enabled site search on your Google account.

How to Set up GA4 Audience for Athos

These steps need to be followed in the order listed, once the configurations for an audience are saved, they cannot be modified. Please read the instructions carefully to avoid errors

Note: Once an audience is set up, it can take up to 24 hours for Google to start collecting and reporting on the data (Read more here).

Log in to your Google Analytics account.
Navigate to Audience Settings in Google Analytics.
Select the "Admin" settings on the bottom left of your screen. This should open up a view where you can view your GA4 property, then select "Audiences" under the property you are using.
Select "New Audience":
Select "Create a custom audience" named "athos":
When you create a custom audience for Athos, it is important to follow the naming convention provided so that Athos can detect and pull the required data.
Use the name "athos" (lowercase). Please ensure there are no spaces before, after, or in between when typing in the audience name.
When setting up an audience, you need to define the scope, event, dimension, or the metric that you would like to apply.
- Scope = This defines the scope of when conditions will be met
- Across all sessions = Adds a user to the audience if the condition is true for all the previous sessions
- Within the same session = Adds a user to the audience if the condition is true for the current session (live session)
- Single event = Adds the user to the audience if the condition is true for a particular event
Select "Within the same session":
Next, we need to set up the event that we will use as a criteria for the "athos" audience. By default, GA4 fires the "view_search_results" event when a user inputs a query and clicks the search button on the website. As the event gets fired on the website, Google sends some default parameters such as search_term, page_location and source.
Set membership duration on the right hand side as 1 day; this means we will capture the search activity as it happens each day and report on it.
The next step is to add a sequence. Sequences let you specify the conditions that need to be met for a user to become a member of this audience. In our case, we would like to know the activity that triggered a purchase as a result of searching on the website.
It is important to keep the scope the same as before "Within the same session" in both drop-down menus: Sequence scoping
And Step 1: Add new condition:
Under "Add new condition", select "purchase" from the drop-down menu under "Events":
Please check all the highlighted settings before saving, as these cannot be edited after the audience is created.
Once you have completed the steps above, click the "Save" in the top right of the form. The newly created "athos" custom audience will now be available in the audience list in your analytics account.