Segments in Looker Studio and GA4

In Universal Analytics, it used to be very easy to bring in Segments that you used in the GA interface into Looker Studio. In GA4, Segments are no longer a thing, so how do you bring display that data that can only be shown by segments?

Option 1: Use Filters

Most of the time, Looker Studio filters can replace simple segments. If you want to just show mobile traffic, you can create a filter that is “device category” = “mobile”

This could also be used for things like Country = Australia or any other session-based dimension.

Option 2: Create Session ID and use blended data

In Universal analytics, is was common to create a session ID custom dimension when setting up the tracking. With the access to BigQuery with GA4 this has become less common. However, it would still be useful if you don’t want to learn SQL and want to only use GA4 data for Looker Studio. See how to set one up here: https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/improve-data-collection-with-four-custom-dimensions/#3-session-id

If you needed to show data for people who clicked a button and then purchased, you could use this session id with blended data. Blending the two in a inner join, matching on session id will give you how many people did both tasks.

Option 3: Audiences

The last option is to set up audiences in GA4. These are similar to segments, but people are added to them over time, so they aren’t retroactive, and they have a lifespan of belonging to the audience, by default, 30 days.

Audiences will only be added to a user’s profile once you set it up, not retroactively.

For a few example audiences, see here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/12799863

For this example, we want to report on the number of abandoned carts we had. The audience would be people who added to the cart but didn’t purchase. In GA4, this would look like this:

Then in Looker Studio, you use a filter, saying audience name = Abandon cart, or whatever you called your audience.

If there are other options, please let me know in the comments. I hope you found this useful.