Once Google Analytics 4 is connected, Cooee creates one GA4 audience for every variation of an experiment: theme, template, split URL and price tests. Each audience holds the visitors who saw that variation, so you can compare variations in your own GA4 reports. See Compare experiment variations in GA4.
What each audience contains
What | Details |
Name | Cooee #<experiment number> · <experiment name> · <variation name>, for example Cooee #42 · Homepage hero · Control. The number is the one shown next to the experiment in Cooee. Long names are shortened to fit GA4's 100-character limit. |
Who is in it | Visitors who triggered the |
How long visitors stay | 540 days, the longest GA4 allows, so a long experiment never loses its early visitors. |
Variations left out | A variation set to 0% of traffic gets no audience, as no visitor can land in it. |
When audiences are created
Automatically, when an experiment goes live, if Experiments is ticked under Create GA4 audiences automatically for on the Google Analytics 4 card in Settings → Integrations. It is ticked when you first connect.
When a paused experiment resumes, for any variation whose audience was archived during the pause.
By hand, from the experiment's page. See the next section.
Cooee creates them within a few minutes. GA4 then takes 24–48 hours to fill them.
Experiments that were already live when you connected GA4, or when you ticked Experiments, don't get audiences automatically. Create theirs from each experiment's page.
Create audiences yourself
Open the experiment in Cooee.
In the GA4 audiences panel, click Create GA4 audiences.
The button shows while the experiment is live and at least one of its variations has no live audience. Cooee creates only the missing ones. Use it when:
automatic creation for experiments is turned off,
the experiment was already live when you connected GA4, or
an audience was not created because your GA4 property was full.
The GA4 audiences panel
Each experiment's page lists its variations and the state of their audiences. Open in GA4 opens your property's list of audiences. GA4 has no link to a single audience, so search the list for its name, for example Cooee #42.
Status | Meaning |
Creating | Cooee is creating the audience in GA4. |
Live | The audience exists in GA4 and collects the variation's visitors. |
Not created — property full | Your GA4 property had no room for the experiment's audiences. See Limits below. |
Archived | Archived 30 days after the experiment ended or was paused. |
No audience | None has been created yet. Click Create GA4 audiences while the experiment is live. |
If the panel shows a message instead, Google Analytics is not connected, needs reconnecting, or has no property chosen yet. Fix it on the Google Analytics 4 card in Settings → Integrations.
When audiences are archived?
30 days after an experiment is stopped, completes or is paused, Cooee archives its audiences. The 30 days leave you time to finish your analysis. GA4 stops showing an audience once it is archived.
An experiment resumed within those 30 days keeps its audiences.
An experiment resumed later gets new ones. Visitors are added again on their next visit.
Cooee only archives audiences it created. It never touches your own.
Limits
GA4 allows 100 audiences per property. Cooee stops creating them once your property has 90, counting your own, so there is always room for yours. It creates all of an experiment's audiences or none: a Control audience without its variations has nothing to be compared with.
When there isn't room, the panel shows Not created — property full. Archive audiences you no longer need in GA4 under Admin → Data display → Audiences, then click Create GA4 audiences on the experiment's page.
Build an audience yourself
You can also build audiences in GA4 yourself, for example with automatic creation turned off. Create a custom audience with the condition: event experience_impression, where the parameter exp_variant_string exactly matches COOEE-<experiment ID>-<variation key>. Our team can share the exact values for your experiments.