GA4 CPC Sessions

GA4 CPC Sessions shows how many visits to your store came from paid ad clicks, as Google Analytics counts them. It also shows how many of those visits added something to the cart.

The GA4 CPC Sessions report, with its summary cards, chart and table

How It’s Calculated

The cards at the top show CPC Sessions and Add to Carts for the date range. With a comparison on, each card also shows the change from the comparison period. The chart draws CPC Sessions for each period, and the table has one row per period.

The columns are:

Sessions: visits that Google Analytics recorded with a medium of cpc.
Add to Carts: the add to cart events in those visits, as GA4 counts them.

The numbers are the ones Google Analytics reports for your connected property. The report is empty until you connect one. How to Connect Google Analytics shows how.

The length of the date range sets how long a period is. Up to 93 days, each row is one day. Longer ranges have one row per month.

What Counts

The medium has to be exactly cpc. Visits tagged paid, ppc or anything else aren’t in this report. Google Ads adds cpc itself when auto-tagging is on, and other ad platforms only add it if you tag their links that way.
Your Segment, Sales Channel and Filters don’t apply, because GA4 doesn’t know about your Shopify customers.

What Good Looks Like

Compare CPC Sessions with your ad spend on Advertising. More spend should buy more visits.

If spend is steady and sessions fall, your ads are reaching fewer people. If sessions rise and spend doesn’t, each visit costs less.

Compare Add to Carts with CPC Sessions. Add to Carts counts events, so it can be higher than CPC Sessions. A low ratio means few of the visitors your ads bring show any interest in buying.

What to Do About It

Sessions falling on steady spend: check your campaigns’ budgets, bids and ad approvals in each ad platform.
Many sessions, few add to carts: check the landing pages your ads point to, and the ad copy against what the page shows.
Which campaigns bring the visits: open Campaign Performance to see spend, clicks and conversions for each campaign.

Where to Find It

GA4 CPC Sessions: open Reports and look under Marketing.
Store Conversion Rate: the overall conversion rate for your store.
Traffic & Conversions: sessions and conversions by channel.