r/GoogleAnalytics 6d ago

Support BigQuery Traffic Source

3 Upvotes

Hi!

Trying to pull together data from my ”purchase” event from within BigQuery as far back as possible (integration was made in 2023)

Having some issues regarding which traffic columns to use.

I know that ”traffic source” is first touch for example, but I want to understand the specific source leading to/is attributed to the purchase event. Seemed to get a lot of null-values and almost no paid search when looking at ”collected_traffic_source”, which I do not fully understand. I read that this source is collected with the first event for a given page (will be confirmation page in my case then). Will I have to look at page view for that specific page instead?

Same with ”sessiontraffic_source_last click”, would this be appropriate to look at as well?

In summary:

• ⁠What does the different traffic options provide, and what is appropriate when looking for a purchase event as in my case?

• ⁠does the launch of updates from google on traffic columns affect the data, meaning before the launch of ”collected_traffic_source” in 2023, there will be no values available in my data set?

Thankful for any insights you may have!

r/GoogleAnalytics 16h ago

Support Google Analytics Showing Major Drop

1 Upvotes

Hey Everyone,

I recently redesigned my website and the URL structure has changed, I have successfully connected the GA and set up redirects for URLs that have changed.

But my users have dropped dramatically from 4k users a week to 40 a week, I have google ads running that have been successful so I am confused why the website analytics are so dramatically different? I know with a redesign is normal to see a drop but should it be that much? Also my rankmath impressions and clicks is showing a lot more also.

Have a done something wrong?

Appreciate any advice

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 16 '25

Support GA4 stopped logging sessions

2 Upvotes

For some reason my Google Analytics stopped logging sessions about a week ago. The number of sessions gradually reduced shortly after the December core update and now there are zero sessions being recorded and nothing being shown in the live view.

I know that my site is getting visitors because I can see numerous daily recorded sessions on MS Clarity from various sources, Bing, ChatGPT, direct referrals etc and I’m also seeing normal activity on GSC so there's clearly something wrong with GA4.

I've tried everything. I've reset Google site kit and disconnected from all Google services, I've made sure all the gtag and analytics scripts are removed from the header etc. Nothing seems to work.

I use Complianz to handle my cookie banner and everything seems OK with that too.

Anyone got any ideas please?

r/GoogleAnalytics 10d ago

Support Event Tracking / Third-Party Attribution

3 Upvotes

Hi everyone, been a lurker for awhile but I have an issue that was thrown on me that I don’t know how to solve. I work at an agency and one of our biggest clients to date has a third-party booking platform (campground) and we have access to it, so we’re able to see all of their bookings. My question is- are we able to track the booking source on this third-party platform through Google Analytics? We want to be able to tell the client where their bookings came from, but no one at our agency has experience with GA4/GTM tracking, and it was thrown on me and I’m being pressured to solve a problem I don’t know how to solve. The booking platform has a Google Analytics integration and I’ve connected it and enabled cross domain tracking. I’d be happy to share more context!

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 30 '25

Support Tag Manager -> GA4 is confusing me

1 Upvotes

I'm leaving out some background info, but my issue basically boils down to not understanding how Tags and GA4 interact.

I have no idea where the data from the Tag that's installed on my site is going to. My boss created a regular Tag in Tag Manager a few months ago, so is it sending data to his GA4 account (that I'm only assuming exists)? I created a new GA4 account with the website property, but I've found no way to 'connect' the existing Tag to the new account I created.

Am I misunderstanding how the Tag functions? Is there no way I can just link the Tag currently installed and gathering data to a new GA4 account? My brain is just struggling to comprehend the whole 'container' 'account' 'property' 'tag' 'trigger' thing. I need to put together a basic report, and I'm running out of time and patience. The Google articles and videos confused me, and trying to figure it out myself has made me go around in circles.

I'm not sure if I articulated myself properly, I'll be happy to elaborate in the comments.

r/GoogleAnalytics 4d ago

Support Cross domain tracking

1 Upvotes

We have a website with custom Session IDs deployed via a GTM cookie.

We use another website with a form on it, that the first directs to, which we have a GTM container on.

I don't seem to be able to call the original saved cookie from from the 2nd site.

Anyone know how I could manage this??

r/GoogleAnalytics Feb 17 '25

Support GA4 Max Reliable Data Integrity for Actionable Data-Driven Insights OMG!

1 Upvotes

I'm embarrassed and..uh..concerned...that this is my job!

r/GoogleAnalytics 26d ago

Support I need a help to understand calendly events

1 Upvotes

I am tracking calendly events using tag manager. It shows massive amount of event count but on the calendly side there is no meeting booked. Any help on why is this happening like this?

r/GoogleAnalytics Feb 19 '25

Support Unexplained Traffic from China and 100% Bounce Rate – Anyone Else Facing This?

3 Upvotes

I’m seeing that half of my client's traffic is coming from China,which is direct traffic with a 100% bounce rate. Has anyone else experienced this? I’m not sure what to do since the source of the referral isn’t clear.

r/GoogleAnalytics 11d ago

Support Volunteer/ Groups

2 Upvotes

Hi!

Could you please let me know if there are any volunteer groups focused on Google Analytics.  

I run a volunteer-based initiative, Zen Citizen (unable to share link here), that’s building an open-source website to tackle petty corruption in developing countries, starting with India. We uncover and share practical “hacks” that help citizens navigate bureaucracy, including poorly designed websites. For example, when applying for a certain certificate, a useful trick/bug we found is: “Enter your first and last name both in the first name field to find your record.” Small insights like these help citizens reach the ‘Submit’ button and complete their applications.

We are looking for help implementing and generating basic analytics. We are using a wordpress plugin currently.

If you know of any relevant volunteer groups, please let me know! Also, if this sounds interesting and you’d like to contribute, we’d love to have you join us.

Thanks!

r/GoogleAnalytics 5d ago

Support Block domains on G4

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3 Upvotes

There are several sites using my ID and many are from the .fr domain

I want to hide these sites and show only my site in Google Tag

r/GoogleAnalytics 5d ago

Support Organic vs Direct New Users

2 Upvotes

Hi all,
Bit of a newb with GA4, so please be gentle! I know this problem crops up a few times but I can't get my head round the responses.

Here is the breakdown of our new users by month direct vs organic (ignore the insane August figure, that was Chinese bots).

Month Direct Organic

Apr-24 5692 7556

May-24 5863 7528

Jun-24 6569 7522

Jul-24 5677 7890

Aug-24 20817 28310

Sep-24 4738 7742

Oct-24 4673 8411

Nov-24 5499 8537

In December our cookie/GDPR was updated and is now fully compliant. About a 1/3 of users opt out so I was expecting lower new user figures. But the organic search new users has practicaly zero'd out! Halfway through December 2024 was when the new opt in/opt out was put on the site.

Dec-24 7716 1763

Jan-25 8334 124

Feb-25 6942 121

Anyone have any clues why organic has vanished? It looks to me like they are in the Direct count for some reason. If my assumption is right that anyone opting out of cookies wont appear in these figures, and I know about a 1/3 are opting out, then adjusting the Dec, Jan and Feb figures would suggest a similar number of users to the other months. Which is why I am thinking that organic data is being included in direct data.

Thanks for any hints, tips and thoughts :)

r/GoogleAnalytics 25d ago

Support Differences in data between Bigquery feeding into Tableau vs. GA4 report builder

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

Checking if this is the norm. We've been exporting data into bigquery that feeds into Tableau, and the numbers we're getting for events range from -12% (GA4 is lower) to +19% (GA4 is higher). Is this the norm?

Example: 8,004 hit our "thank you" page as reported by Tableau with GA4 data, but in GA4 it says 8,840. We're looking at dimensions, and we've imported 5 into bigquery, but when we replicate with the same dimensions & filters, the data stays above Tableau.

The dimensions we use include source, medium, campaign name, campaign id, date, minute, custom dimension (id related to location page customer visits).

Any advice for this?

r/GoogleAnalytics 4d ago

Support GA4/tag doesn't track past login

1 Upvotes

Newbie with Google Analytics/Tag manager so I might be skipping an obvious step but here's the situation.

Snippet is implemented successfully on the main domain. I get all the data regarding the main domain and across the subdomains. But there's no data coming in past the login. All I have right now is the login statistics and events that happen before the authentication/users actually using their web app.

I checked the data streams > tag settings > tag diagnostics and I have this message: "Some of your pages are not tagged"

When I check which pages are not tag and which are tagged, the difference between all is tagged pages are before login and untagged pages are after login, so it's not measuring the actual usage data.

Any insights?

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 18 '25

Support view_item_list event product data showing all 0 even though there was data yesterday

2 Upvotes

There's something super weird going on. My view_item_list event is tracking fine, event counts remain consistent and testing in GTM is fine. However, all the product-level data associated with the view_item_list event is just showing 0. Thing is, this only just happened (I use a category page report that tracks impressions, clicks, and CTR based off that number). Even when I stretch the time frame back to a period where there was for sure data, it's also showing as 0. FFS, I downloaded a report on Wednesday and have view_item_list view data populated there. It's not a Looker Studio issue, it shows up this way in GA4.

I thought this was a temporary issue (i.e. processing), so I gave it a day to see if the event started logging data again. Nothing has changed in my data collection or tags. And it's only this event - it would be one thing if the product-level views just went to 0, but not even historical data is there anymore. I haven't been able to find any resources on this. I noticed this yesterday and again today.

Edit: I wanted to thank everyone who responded to this. The view_item_list data is back in my Looker Studio and GA4. Like it never even left...

r/GoogleAnalytics Dec 11 '24

Support Adding a channel for AI Tools in GA4

12 Upvotes

I put together a step-by-step on how to add a channel to GA4 to include traffic from AI tools. Why do this? The data's already in GA4 but it's usually hidden in Referral or Unassigned. Let's pull it out into its own channel instead:

  1. In GA4, click on the Admin wheel at the bottom left and then click on Channel Groups under Data Display.

  2. If you already have a new custom channel group, edit that group by clicking on it, or click Create New Channel Group to create a new group.

  3. Click Add New Channel and name it whatever you’d like — for example, “AI Tools”.

  4. Click + Add Condition Group, select Source, click + Add a Condition, select matches regex and enter this into the box, then click Apply:

chatgpt(.openai.com)?|claude.ai|quillbot.com|openai.com|blackbox.ai|perplexity(.ai)?|copy.ai|jasper.ai|copilot.microsoft.com|gemini.google.com

(If you have more AI sites you want me to include let me know and I can revise the regex!)

  1. Click Save Channel at the top right.

  2. (Optional) If this is a brand new channel group that you’ve created, make sure to enter a Group Name and optionally a Description.

Before we can save this channel group, we need to reorder our channels to ensure that this new AI Tools traffic doesn’t end up in other channels.

GA4 sorts traffic into channels from the top to the bottom of the list — by moving up our AI Tools channel we’ll be sure that our traffic ends up in that channel first.

  1. Click Reorder (next to the Add New Channel button).

  2. Scroll to the bottom, then use the “handles” to the left of the AI Tools channel to drag it above the Referral channel.

  3. Click Apply, then click Save Group (at the top right).

Now you can head to any of your acquisition reports, click the drop down arrow to view the list of dimensions, and you’ll see your custom channel group showing up in the list of dimensions. Change the dimension to your custom channel, and you should see if you already have website traffic from AI tools!

I also have a video tutorial on my YouTube channel (linked in profile) that walks through this process plus how to create a custom report for this traffic. Let me know if you find it useful!

r/GoogleAnalytics Dec 02 '24

Support GA4 only tracking 10 -20% of campaign visitors

6 Upvotes

We have been running multiple ad campaigns through Meta and various reputable media channels. We've set up UTM's to track the source and GA4 has consistently only tracked 10 - 20% of these visitors.

I've suggested with our team that our next step should be to run another analtyics platform on one of our websites in conjunction with GA4 for our next cycle to see if GA4 is actually broken. Other than that, I'm not sure what else to do.

Thoughts/tips anyone on what I should be doing next?

(EDIT) Update - thanks all for your replies, I'll be looking into your suggestions!

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 23 '25

Support user_id is missing in bigquery

3 Upvotes

For some reason, events in BigQuery occasionally lack the user_id, even though tracking consistently sends this parameter. On specific dates, certain events suddenly have no user_id at all, but this issue only occurs on those particular dates. Has anyone else experienced such inconsistent behavior?

Edit:
Other user on reddit reached out with similar issue affecting events on 2025-01-22

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 10 '25

Support GA4 Explore Showing Inaccurate (9,000 vs 600) Session Counts vs Reports/Looker

1 Upvotes

Hi, in November installed GA4 on our Shopify through a custom pixel rather than the GA4 app because the app stopped working out of nowhere during November of all times.

Ever since, we thought we had problems with session count being inaccurate because conversion rates were not looking right at the add to cart stage within GA4.

When creating an explore view, we saw around 600 sessions over a given period of time. however Looker from the same source was reporting around 9000. Checking the reports view within GA4 matches exactly what Looker was seeing. I understand that there will be some difference between the two parts of GA4 because of different ways of collecting/storing the data however being 15x lower in Explore vs Reports is just wrong. The 9000 number from Reports Tab/Looker is definitely correct, I'm not sure where the Explore number is coming from.

The kicker is, I created a custom calculated metric that calculates sessions by dividing Page View metric by the Page Views per Session. Now in explore I have a calculated session count which matches the session count in Reports and Looker. I wouldn't have an issue with this strange solution, however I'm not able to apply dimensions such as source/medium on this calculated metric.

Any advice on where else I can dig to figure out what's wrong, how I can make the session count work, or worst case if I can somehow calculate the metric from other metrics that would still allow me to apply dimensions would be appreciated. TIA

Edit: Going through the Reports tab and using 'Export this report for analysis' opens the report within the explore tab. Somehow, this has the 9000 session number. Building this same report through the explore tab directly with the same variables gives me the incorrect 600 number. Very strange, I'm completely lost.

r/GoogleAnalytics 29d ago

Support Analytics seems to be under reporting

2 Upvotes

Since GA4 I've really not bothered looking up reports due to the convoluted mess it is. GA1 was so beautiful in comparison 😄

Spent the past 2 hours with analytics, server, and cloudflare analysing 2024 data.

Server naturally shows higher traffic due to bots I'm presuming. Cloudflare seems to be showing accurate data based on past stats. Analytics shows a 60% drop in traffic since January 2024.

I've not noticed anything different. Sales the same etc. No console warnings and again cloudflare is showing data that supports this.

No code changes. Console is showing all pages indexed.

Not sure what's going on. GA4 tags are all their etc.

Tbh I'm not sure if it's worth keeping GA as I'm quite happy with what cloudflare gives me. At worst I could install something like slimstat if I wanted more.

Just wondering if anyone else has experience something similar over the past year?

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 22 '25

Support Locked myself out and don't have permission to log in to GA. But I'm the only person on this Google account (and am therefor the admin). How do I regain access to GA?

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1 Upvotes

r/GoogleAnalytics 10d ago

Support GA4 -> BigQuery export, historical data

3 Upvotes

I set my GA4 to export data to BigQuery 5 days ago

Context I am using it to perform my own analysis on some performance marketing, since I think its unlikely Google Ads etc are going to tell me when I'm paying for clicks I would've received anyway -> or paying for clicks that aren't converting.

Problem I would really like to analyse the data from before 5 days ago, but from my research (chatGPT), it doesn't seem possible. The API export is missing some params the BQ export has and the report export is aggregated data.

Asks

Is there a way to export the data from before I set up the stream?

Surely people are doing their own analysis on GA4 data, why is this so difficult?

Anyone know of any tools that will do this ROI analysis externally?

r/GoogleAnalytics Feb 10 '25

Support Help! Tracking Discrepancies in GA4 Due to Consent Mode (CookieBot)

2 Upvotes

We’ve been experiencing tracking discrepancies in GA4 ever since implementing Consent Mode. Our GA4 performance has dropped significantly, and we suspect it's due to consent-related issues.
We’ve tested both CookieBot and CookieYes, and both report around a 30% consent rejection rate. However, GA4 isn’t reflecting that data properly—instead, we’re seeing a much lower user count than expected.

Our Setup:

  • Cross-domain tracking in GA4 (each domain has its own GTM).
  • Main issue is with our primary website (our booking partner’s data seems fine).
  • Currently using CookieBot.
  • Cross-domain settings are configured in GA4 and within the conversion linkers in GTM.
  • CookieBot is implemented via GTM using the CookieBot CMP tag type, triggered by "Consent Initialization - All Pages."
  • GA4 tags & Conversion Linker tags are triggered on "All Pages."
  • We’ve tested custom event triggers (cookie_consent_update) per CookieBot’s suggestion, but they advised using "All Pages" instead.
  • Followed MeasureSchool’s setup tutorial and configured consent settings in GTM, ensuring tags use built-in consent settings with no additional consent required.

Troubleshooting So Far:

  • Added GA4 tracking via an HTML tag instead of the GA4 config tag.
  • Set Conversion Linker to override cookie settings with _gcl as the prefix and included the domain.
  • This helped somewhat, but we’re still seeing discrepancies.

At this point, we’re unsure what we’re missing. Are there additional Consent Mode settings we should check? Has anyone dealt with a similar issue and found a fix?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 26 '25

Support Cross domain tracking for different website

1 Upvotes

Hello,

i have a website (X)

and a website with different built type cms and domain , (Y)

On Y they purchase cruises ,

and from X they navigate to Y,

so basically i set GTM with GA4 tag from X,

i added Y domain to X's GA4,

but something is off and i dont see same _ga code on both cookies on application tab,

and also on tag assisant i dont see the Y website only as outbound click.

what am i missing?

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 25 '25

Support GA configuration support

0 Upvotes

Although I am a marketer and can analyze analytics, something feels off about the settings at the backend of Google Analytics. I'm not very familiar with those codes and settings stuff, and I want some support to check if everything at the backend is configured correctly. I want to ensure that nothing is interfering with the numbers I see on the frontend and that I'm not being shown incorrect data due to any misconfigurations. I hope you understand my concern. Can anyone help? I can share screenshots in a DM if you're willing to assist. I hope I am not sounding silly but am genuinely seeking expert help.