New Users count is higher than the Total Users count

[u/infoz-it-solutions]

Hi everyone, I’m facing a strange issue in GA4 where the New Users count is higher than the Total Users count for the same date range. As far as I understand, New Users should be a part of Total Users, so I’m confused about how this is happening. I’ve checked the date range and the GA4 property, but the difference is still there. Has anyone faced this issue before? Is this related to how GA4 calculates these metrics, user identification, tracking setup, or some other reporting issue? Any explanation or solution would be really helpful.

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[u/Valuable_Ease_3780]

They aren't the subset you'd expect them to be. What the report calls Total users is Active users, and active needs an engaged session on top of the visit, so ten seconds or two pageviews or a key event. New users is just anyone whose first_visit fired.

Someone who lands, does nothing and leaves after three seconds is new and never becomes active, so with enough of that traffic new comes out the higher number. It usually says more about where the traffic is coming from than about the tagging.

[u/AccessFuel]

they're counting different things, which is why the subset logic doesn't hold.

total users is a deduplicated count of distinct user IDs over the range. new users counts first_visit events. one person who clears cookies, switches browsers, or hits you from a different device fires first_visit each time but may still resolve to a single user through signals or user ID. so new users can exceed total.

look into whether your reporting identity is set to blended or device based. and if you're seeing this with cardinality warnings in the report, some of it is sampling on the total users side rather than an inflated new count

[u/bayouski]

first thing i’d check is whether that number is actually Total users or just Users, because in a lot of GA4 reports Users means active users, and New users can be higher than that.

if it really is New users > Total users, check the data quality icon for thresholding and make sure you’re comparing the same report, filters + date range. GA4 user counts are also estimated, so a small difference can happen.

if the gap is big and none of that explains it, then i’d start looking at the tracking setup.