What Are the Four Scope Types in Google Analytics?

Making sense of Google Analytics reports can feel like trying to solve a puzzle with pieces that don’t quite fit. You pull what seems like a simple report, but the numbers look strange or don’t answer your question. More often than not, the solution lies in understanding a single core concept: scope. This article will break down what scope is and clearly explain the four types in Google Analytics, so you can build reports that give you confidence, not confusion.

What is 'Scope' in Google Analytics?

In Google Analytics, scope defines the level at which a piece of data is being measured. Think of it as the context or "container" for your dimensions and metrics. It answers the fundamental question: "Is this data about a visitor, a specific visit, or a single action?"

When you align the scope of your dimensions and metrics correctly, your reports make sense. When you don't, you get confusing, and often incorrect, results. The hierarchy of scopes, from broadest to most specific, is User > Session > Event > Hit.

To make this tangible, let's use a simple coffee shop analogy:

• User Scope: This is about a specific customer, let's call her Sarah. No matter how many times Sarah visits the coffee shop this month or this year, she is always one unique user. User-level data sticks to Sarah herself, like her customer loyalty number or her all-time favorite drink.
• Session Scope: This is about a single visit to the coffee shop. If Sarah stops by on Monday morning and comes back again on Wednesday afternoon, that's two separate sessions. Session-level data is only about what happened during that one visit, like whether she came in a rush or sat down to work.
• Event Scope: This is about a specific, meaningful action Sarah takes during her visit. For example, ordering a large latte is an event. So is using the free Wi-Fi or buying a pastry. Events are the key milestones that happen during a session.
• Hit Scope: This is the most granular level, representing any single interaction. In the old Google Analytics (Universal Analytics), a hit could be loading the menu page or the payment confirmation page. In Google Analytics 4, 'hit-level' scope has been rolled into 'event-level' scope, as every interaction, including a page view, is now considered an event. We'll cover this more below, but it's important to know the term as you look at older data or guides.

The Four Scope Types, Explained in Detail

Understanding the coffee shop analogy is a great start. Now let's apply these concepts directly to the dimensions and metrics you'll find inside Google Analytics.

1. User-Level Scope

This is the highest-level scope, focusing on the individual person visiting your site or app. Data collected at the user level follows that individual across all their sessions and interactions over time - weeks, months, or even years, depending on your data retention settings.

• What it answers: "Who are my visitors?" and "Where did my most valuable long-term visitors come from?"
• Example Dimensions: First user medium (How did this user first discover my site?), Age, Gender, Country ID. These are characteristics of the user that don't typically change from session to session.
• Example Metrics: Total Users, New Users, Returning Users.

When to use it: User-level scope is perfect for understanding your audience and the long-term impact of your acquisition channels. For instance, you can use the First user source/medium dimension to see if users who first found you through your blog content eventually become higher-value customers than those who came from a paid ad.

2. Session-Level Scope

A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given timeframe. By default in GA4, a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. Session-level scope applies to data collected during that single visit.

• What it answers: "What happened during each visit?" and "How did visitors get here this time?"
• Example Dimensions: Session source/medium (How did this specific visit start?), Landing page + query string (What was the first page of this visit?), Default Channel Group.
• Example Metrics: Sessions, Engaged sessions, Average session duration, Bounce rate (a UA metric, replaced by Engagement rate in GA4).

When to use it: Session-level scope is your go-to for analyzing campaign performance and website engagement for individual visits. You could see if visitors starting a session from an email campaign (Session source/medium = email) view more pages than those who start from a social media post.

Notice the huge difference between First user source/medium (user scope) and Session source/medium (session scope). A user's first source is set in stone, but they can have many different session sources based on how they returned to your site each time.

3. Event-Level Scope

An event is a specific user interaction that you measure on your website or app. In GA4, everything is an event - a page view, a scroll down the page, a form submission, an "add to cart" click, a purchase. Event-level scope applies data directly to one of those specific actions.

• What it answers: "What are my visitors doing?" and "How often do they complete key actions?"
• Example Dimensions: Crucially, event-scoped dimensions are often Event Parameters, which add context. For an add_to_cart event, parameters might include item_name, price, and item_category. Other dimensions include Event name and Page location (the URL where the event happened).
• Example Metrics: Event count, Conversions (which are just events you’ve marked as important).

When to use it: Use event-level scope to analyze user behavior in detail. You can create a report to see exactly which products (item_name) are added to the cart most often or which download buttons (event_name = file_download) on a specific blog post (page_location) get the most clicks.

4. Hit-Level Scope (Legacy)

As mentioned, this was the bedrock of the old Universal Analytics (UA). A "hit" was any single datapoint sent to GA - pageviews, events, transactions, and more. It was the most granular form of tracking possible.

So why did Google change this for GA4? Because the hit-based model was rigid. You had separate "hit types," and customizing them was difficult. GA4’s event-based model is more flexible. A page_view is now simply an event with the name "page_view". A purchase is an event named "purchase". A click is an event. This unification simplifies everything and makes the data model more consistent.

For modern analysis in GA4, you will almost exclusively think in terms of User, Session, and Event scope. Knowing about hit-level scope is primarily useful for context if you’re looking at old UA data or comparing past performance.

Why Scope Mismatch Creates Confusing Reports

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. The single biggest reason reports fail is a scope mismatch. You can’t mix and match dimensions and metrics from different scopes and expect a logical outcome. It's like asking, "Show me all the customers who visited yesterday, broken down by every single web page they saw in their lifetime." The data just doesn't align that way.

The rule of thumb is to combine dimensions and metrics of the same scope.

Here’s a classic example of what goes wrong:

• The Goal: You want to see which landing pages bring in the most new users.
• The Mistake: You pull a report with the Landing page dimension (session-level) and the New Users metric (user-level).
• The Confusing Result: The report will show a number, but it's not what you think. GA will attribute the "new user" metric to the very first session that new user ever had. If that same user returns a week later via a different landing page, their second session won't contribute a "new user." The data will be misleading because you combined a session-specific starting point with a user-lifetime attribute.

How to do it correctly:

• To see how many sessions start on a specific page, combine Landing Page (session-level) with Sessions or Engaged sessions (session-level metrics).
• To see where new users come from, combine First user source/medium (user-level) with New Users (user-level metric).

Becoming aware of scope helps you pause before creating a report and ask, "Do these pieces of data actually belong together?"

Putting It All Together: A Real-World Journey

Let's follow a user named Dave to see how these scopes play out in a real scenario.

1. On Monday, Dave sees a Twitter ad and clicks on it. He lands on your "Ultimate Guide to Pianos" blog post, reads for 4 minutes, and then leaves.
2. On Wednesday, Dave remembers your site and searches on Google for your brand name. He clicks the organic result, lands on your homepage, and browses a few product pages.
3. During that session, he sees an on-page CTA and submits your "Contact Us" form before leaving.

Let’s break down Dave’s journey by scope:

• User Scope:
• Session Scope:
• Event Scope:

Seeing how this single journey produces data points across different scopes makes it clear why choosing the right dimension and metric is so important for building a report that tells the true story.

Final Thoughts

Understanding the hierarchy of user, session, and event scope is the fundamental building block of accurate data analysis in Google Analytics. It empowers you to move beyond default reports and confidently build custom views that answer your most pressing business questions. Once you start thinking in terms of scope, you’ll find that the "puzzle pieces" of your data start fitting together perfectly.

Of course, getting scopes right is often the most time-consuming part of manual analytics. We built Graphed to handle this complexity for you under the hood. When you use simple language to ask a question like, "Show me which of my ad campaigns attract the most users who eventually make a purchase," our AI already understands the user, session, and event scopes involved. It automatically pulls and combines the correct data, so you don’t have to worry about mismatched dimensions and metrics. You can simply connect your data and start getting the clear, accurate reports you need in seconds.