Calculated metrics in GA4

TLDR – they don't exist in the reports, either the standard or the explore.

Update, they are coming soon

asked on a Facebook GA4 group. 22/01/2023

I was doing a report for a client the other day and he wanted page load time by continent as a report. This is not something you can do without extra code.

Its not too difficult though, just a bit of javascript in tag manager. The problem comes when reporting it. In the regular reports, you can't actually view by continent so you have to do an explore report.

I get something like that for the month. Thats the total load time, by the total number of views. What would be handy is if you can create a calculated metric that would give you the average page load time. Its easy enough in Excel. You can export the report to csv and calculate it

It would be well handy to be able to create a new field as a calculated metric but at the time of writing its not possible. There was something in Universal Google Analytics but not in Google Analytics 4.

Looker Studio

The other way to do it would be to connect to Looker studio and perform the calculation there. For advanced users though, the explore reports offer the best experience when trying to get insights from your data so it would be handy to have them there.

Maybe they will implement it

Features keep getting released though, so hopefully its in the works but for now, its either export to csv or Looker studio.

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2 Comments

  1. Hi Ben: would you be able to explain in more detail how you got your “load_time_sec” value to appear in your GA4 Exploration report? Following instructions from another source, I created a “Page Load Time” event in GTM and I created a custom metric in the GA4 account that matches up with the page load time parameter I have set up in the tag. It works perfectly, but I can’t get any time values like you have listed in your example above. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

  2. Hi Paul

    I just added it as a custom dimension in the explore reports. I would really just add it to looker though. The integration is so good now, I use looker rather than the main reports.

    If you want to book a free 15 minute call, I can go through what I did but it was a long time ago and the client has taken me off that account.

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