Card Types & Metrics
~6 min readDefault goal cards
Your first dashboard includes seven cards, pre-wired to your GA4 property. Each has a default goal threshold that you set during onboarding — you can change them at any time from the card's Edit menu.
Sessions Growth Goal
Tracks session volume growth versus the previous month.
- Metric: Sessions
- Default goal: Grow ≥ 10% compared to the previous month
- Visualization: Metric with trend indicator
Active Users
Tracks your active user count versus the same 30-day period a year ago.
- Metric: Active Users (30-day window)
- Default goal: Grow ≥ 5% compared to the previous year
- Visualization: Metric with trend indicator
Monthly New Users Goal
Tracks new users acquired this calendar month toward a fixed monthly target.
- Metric: New Users
- Default goal: Reach ≥ 1,000 new users this month (editable)
- Visualization: Gauge with alert threshold
Bounce Rate
Tracks your bounce rate versus the previous month. Lower is better — the goal type is set to "reduce by."
- Metric: Bounce Rate
- Default goal: Reduce by ≥ 10% compared to the previous month
- Visualization: Metric with alert indicator
Engagement Rate Goal
Tracks the percentage of sessions that were "engaged" (lasted 10+ seconds, had a conversion event, or had 2+ page views).
- Metric: Engagement Rate
- Default goal: Maintain ≥ 60% engagement rate this month (editable)
- Visualization: Gauge with trend
Key Event Rate Goal
Tracks the rate at which sessions contain at least one key event (conversion). Uses GA4's session_key_event_rate metric.
- Metric: Session Key Event Rate
- Default goal: Maintain ≥ 2% key event rate this month (editable)
- Visualization: Gauge with alert threshold
Pageviews Trend
Displays daily page view volume as a sparkline. No goal threshold — useful for spotting traffic patterns and anomalies.
- Metric: Page Views (daily group-by)
- Goal: None — trend display only
- Visualization: Sparkline with trend indicator
Metric registry
All metrics available in SmashGL queries use the source format SOURCE ga4.report.<metric>.
| Metric name | SmashGL name | Unit | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sessions | sessions |
count | higher is better |
| Active Users | active_users |
count | higher is better |
| Total Users | total_users |
count | higher is better |
| New Users | new_users |
count | higher is better |
| Page Views | screen_page_views |
count | higher is better |
| Key Events | key_events |
count | higher is better |
| Session Key Event Rate | session_key_event_rate |
% | higher is better |
| User Key Event Rate | user_key_event_rate |
% | higher is better |
| Engagement Rate | engagement_rate |
% | higher is better |
| Engaged Sessions | engaged_sessions |
count | higher is better |
| Bounce Rate | bounce_rate |
% | lower is better |
| Avg Session Duration | average_session_duration |
seconds | higher is better |
| Total Revenue | total_revenue |
currency | higher is better |
GA4 returns rate metrics (engagement rate, bounce rate, key event rate) as decimals between 0 and 1. dashboardSMASHBOARD automatically multiplies these by 100 so your goals and card values work in percentages.
SmashGL synonyms
These aliases resolve to the metric listed:
| Alias | Resolves to |
|---|---|
pageviews |
screen_page_views |
visitors |
active_users |
users |
active_users |
conversions |
key_events |
conversion_rate |
session_key_event_rate |
Example SmashGL query
SOURCE ga4.report.sessions
WINDOW this_month
COMPARE last_month
GOAL grow >= 10%
VISUALIZE metric
See the SmashGL reference for the full query language.
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