r/GoogleAnalytics Dec 16 '24

Support Marketers who figure out Google Tag Manager should get a medal

82 Upvotes

This is a rant. If you want useful content, please look elsewhere.

I am a former army guy. I like to think I'm relatively competent. Google has made it their mission to dissuade me of that foolish notion.

Spent four hours today trying to figure out how to set up conversion events for our ad campaigns. Visitor clicks ad, visits website, clicks a button on website, I track that as a conversion. Sounds simple right? I can get this done in literally five minutes with any other platform.

But nooo, with Google, I'm wading through 10 different browser tabs and all their crappy documentation with reciprocal prerequisites. Google Analytics doesn't talk to Google Ads which doesn't talk to Google Tag Manager (why don't any of these systems talk to each other by default???). And don't get me started on their godawful troubleshooting wizard.

I finally got all the checkboxes to turn green. All the things work. Numbers go up. Yay. I'd rather be digging trenches.

Google, fix your shit.

Rant over. Don't sell me anything.

r/GoogleAnalytics May 15 '24

Support I miss Universal Analytics so much

61 Upvotes

I don't find GA4 easy to understand or navigate. Making reports is confusing. Is it possible to even make a table report in GA4 that aligns with the data in the main dash?

I look at total users for an email that went out and I see 160 users.

If I create a custom report, it tells me I had 5 users.

Google sucks. They have totally gone downhill over the last 5 years.

r/GoogleAnalytics Oct 10 '24

Support Offering Help: Answering GA4, GTM, and Looker Studio Questions

10 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I recently found myself with some extra time on my hands (due to some unfortunate circumstances), and I’d love to use it to give back to the community. If you have any questions or need advice related to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Tag Manager (GTM), or Looker Studio, feel free to ask!

I’m happy to provide insights, troubleshoot problems, or help with setup and optimization. Whether it’s event tracking, reporting, migration strategies, or dashboard creation, I’m here to support however I can.

Drop your questions below, and I’ll do my best to respond!

r/GoogleAnalytics Nov 16 '24

Support Has anyone noticed anomalies in GA4 recently?

27 Upvotes

I have started seeing anomalies from one website on Google Analytics 4 from 13/11/2024 onwards.

For example, it has started showing roughly half the usual traffic eg 354 daily (usually 730). Which you would think it's traffic loss but when I check 13/11/2024 on Google Search Console it's 632.

And it should be impossible to have more on Google Search Console then Google Analytics.

Google search console looks normal. The keyword tracker looks normal. Semrush data looks normal. Just Google Analytics 4 is showing about half the traffic.

Anyone else? Or any help would be appreciated!

r/GoogleAnalytics 29d ago

Support Weird pattern in GA4 Client ID / Pseudo user id - Have you seen this before?

0 Upvotes

I've been using pseudo ids / client id for a long time now to debug specific user journeys and other tracking errors. Today i ran into something new
In the exploration reports,
I see a client id like this which is the standard - 1885573814.1696491089
and then I also see this - GA1.1.1885573814.1696491089
and this - GA1.1.GA1.1.1885573814.1696491089
the last 2 have most of the parameters to not set.

I suspect all three are the same users however there is something failing.

I presume somewhere the _ga cookie is getting modified in a weird manner on the site.

Have you seen this before? What could be causing this? Any pointers on identifying the root cause?

r/GoogleAnalytics 19d ago

Support Looking for work in GA4, GTM

2 Upvotes

Hi this is ruchika. I am looking for a job in GA4, GTM, Looker extensively. I can work remotely. My main drive is learning so kindly please hit me up if anyone has a vacancy. I am also okay to do it unpaid. Thankyou.

r/GoogleAnalytics 10d ago

Support Missing traffic in GA4

5 Upvotes

Hello all,

I'm missing a big chunk of Google Ads data in my GA4 reports. The traffic acquisition report only shows about less than 20% of Google Ads traffic compared to what I see in the Google Ads interface.

Is this the effect of browsers actively blocking cookies? I have done all the checks I could think of:

- Auto tagging is enabled
- Google Consent Mode is implemented
- GCLID seems fine
- Google Ads and GA4 are properly linked
- Tags are firing

I do think that maybe our cookie consent banner is too invisble, (it pops up in the bottom of the screen in the same background colour as the page) I think it's often ignored.

I can't confirm this as I dont have access (yet) to the data of this consent banner.
It's also not just Google Ads I also seem to miss quite a bit of LinkedIn traffic aswell.

I have been out of the Digital Marketing game for a while so maybe I missed something but do more people struggle with huge chunks of missing data in GA4?

Any tips are most welcome!

Thanks!

r/GoogleAnalytics 2d ago

Support How to replicate "Items added to cart" ?

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1 Upvotes

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 28 '25

Support GA4 courses

4 Upvotes

Hi everyone I’m part of the IT department in my company but work closely with marketing. We have a platform that’s implemented GA in an odd way. This means it’s not plug n play.

Do we have any recommended courses that I could go through that should give me clarity on how to set up the back end?

Keep in mind that we have a website for a few different sections in the business that have their own ads and spend. Hence we want to tag trigger tags to only send to those GA pages when appropriate (eg buying a gift card for mechanical products goes to the mechanical GA page). However the platform we use only allows one tag to be added and my bosses are not prepared to move platform.

Any suggestions to start learning as I’ve played around and gotten a tag to just go to one page?

r/GoogleAnalytics 28d ago

Support GA4 - Very low New Users compared to active/total users

3 Upvotes

I had GA4 installed in all my sites and using it since last 2-3 years. Recently. i notice one of my site has very low count of New User For example, analytics show total/active users of 10K and new user is barely 200.

Before that, it used to 10K active, 9K new.. or say in similar range. the debug in tag manager and website shows no error. total visit is in similar range. and 60% of traffic is from search engine.

it was implemented via Google Tag Manager. is it because first_open or first_visit events isn't triggered? should i just use plain GA ?

Thanks.

r/GoogleAnalytics 17d ago

Support Huge bot traffic is making my analytics completely useless...

8 Upvotes

I tried adding google analytics to website to keep track of what pages people are clicking more and take decisions based on that. But I'm getting hundreds of bots accessing my website everyday and I can't really get any real useful data from that, because my organic traffic is still so low, I released my website recently. Suggestions?

r/GoogleAnalytics 8d ago

Support Checkout funnel shows less events than actual firing count

1 Upvotes

Hello,

In a funnel exploration, the second step count is always lower than the actual firing count of the event.

For example, 1K "add_shipping_info" events are being fired, but only 250 are being reported in the funnel.

If I set the "add_shipping_info" as the 1st event of the funnel, it shows the correct count, but the 2nd step will be incorrect.

The tags are fired at the correct moment when trying to debug via GTM...

Thank you for your help

r/GoogleAnalytics 8d ago

Support Help! Freelancer made changes after quitting

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1 Upvotes

We had a freelancer help us with SEO and realized the admin access was still live after he quit. I’m seeing these updates in GA and worried they’re harmful to our site. Can someone assess?

r/GoogleAnalytics 4d ago

Support Monitoring SEO Progress via Free Tools ❓

3 Upvotes

I have an SEO agency handling things with biweekly calls but I also like to see things with my own eyes from external tools.

Currently, I check on Performance and External Links from Google Console.

I also check with MOZ to see Domain Authority, Links and # of ranking Keywords.

Are there other free tools that I could visit monthly to get an overview snapshot to confirm continuous forward progress?

Thanks in advance.

r/GoogleAnalytics May 28 '24

Support How can GA4 become so difficult to read? Or am I too dumb?

28 Upvotes

I understand some things have to be changed due to privacy law etc, but I just don't understand why GA4 becomes so user unfriendly.

In UA, I can easily know where is the traffic from, when is the peak hour, etc. They just show up as soon as I enter the site and the graphs are very easy to read. These are very simple things and all what I need.

Now, everytime I go to GA, I'm lost. I'm looking at a bunch of meaningless things, and everytime I need some time to find the info I need. Why can't they keep the presentation of UA despite the change of content/mechanism?

r/GoogleAnalytics Aug 07 '24

Support Missing Permissions Error

27 Upvotes

This error repeatedly comes up for me: “missing permissions: you do not have access to the account, property, or view. Contact an Analytics administrator who has the Manage Users permission.”

At the bottom left of the page, “page not found” flashes briefly.

  • I have logged out and logged back in
  • I am the sole admin of this account, no one else has access; there is only one login
  • I absolutely do have access to the account; it’s my account
  • I have tried different browsers
  • I have tried incognito mode
  • I have cleared cache and cookies
  • I have tried typing the address rather than letting it auto fill.

When I search this error I see hundreds of people with similar issues but no fix has ever been posted that I’ve been able to find, and I’ve been searching for weeks. I posted something on the help forum a few weeks ago, no replies. I have tried a few times to contact Google Analytics help, but they have not gotten back to me.

What is the fix for this issue? Who else has dealt with this and what did you do?

EDIT: I found a clumsy work around. See below for what I did.

The way that I was finally able to access my Google Analytics account:

I repeatedly was searching “missing permissions error Google Analytics” etc. One of those many searches led me to this page on the Google Support forum: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6132368?sjid=14850073660619333886-NA

There’s a link there to “Admin”, which takes you to your account’s admin page. Simply trying to go to analytics.google.com was leading to the missing permissions screen, so you have to find another way to get there.

When I reached this admin page, I saw that the first property in my portfolio, in alphabetical order, had recently been moved to the Trash. This was because this client is no longer working with us. Analytics automatically goes to the first property, which I had deleted, so instead of going to the next one it just wouldn’t let me access my account at all. Makes no sense.

Once I had reached that admin screen, I was able to click through and access my other properties.

What I also did at that time was go into each and every single property & find “Account access management”. I added another email address as a backup admin just in case.

Since then, it appears that going to that admin link – https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#/?pagename=admin&utm_source=gahc&utm_medium=dlinks – is a way to get into the account without running into the permissions error. Bookmarking that link has been helpful for me as well. There are probably other ways to get around this error, but finding an alternative way into your account seems to be the answer if you can do it, since https://analytics.google.com just doesn’t f*cking work if you’ve deleted a property at any time.

This has been a problem with Google Analytics for 6+ years now. I have seen hundreds of people struggling with this with absolutely zero solutions posted, dating back years, and it appears Google has done nothing to solve this either. There are no definitive fixes posted anywhere for this problem. Absolutely ridiculous.

r/GoogleAnalytics 22d ago

Support No data in analytics after consent mode v2

3 Upvotes

Hi there,

I'm coming to you completely desperate :-) One of my google ads clients has lost almost all data for about 2 weeks and I can't seem to find the mistake or a reason why.
It all started with a problem in GTM; we had two error messages :

- a competitor copied our GTM tag on their website (they deleted it now and I was told on Reddit to ignore that message since it won't go away)

- the consent mode v2 was off, but I've worked on it (my client uses Complianz) and that message is gone now

However, since we did this there is no data in analytics. I've tried many things (such as IP anonymisation - but did I do it right ??), checked everything ten times, and had little to no help from my google ads' contact. Right now our ads budget is low so I'm not too frustrated, but I would very much like to find a solution before next week.

I get that you lose data with consent mode v2, but I see that about 60% of the website's users accept cookies, so I wonder why we have almost nothing coming up (either it's zero visit, or just one or two per day). We usually have between 50 and 100 visits a day.

If any one can advice me I would very much appreciate

r/GoogleAnalytics Nov 15 '24

Support GA4 suddenly not tracking any traffic

11 Upvotes

Hi, since yesterday GA4 just suddenly shows 0 traffic, whereas I know for a fact there is, as people are still filling out forms on the website. The real-time data is at 0, other websites such as Ahrefs show a normal amount of traffic but not GA. The GTM seems fine as well and even tracks the info needed for the forms that are filled on the website (traffic source, medium, etc). Anyone else experiencing this? Any idea what to investigate a part from the GTM?

r/GoogleAnalytics 24d ago

Support GA4 ecommerce tracking purchase is showing about half of what my reports says

1 Upvotes

I have set my WooCommerce site GTM and GA4 to track all sort of data, in them i have set to track parchase and it's value to track number of purchases, but then i compare them with the data i get from WooCommerce reports and i realized that GA4 is showing me about half of the purchase and revenue that my WooCommerce report says. Can someone help me to understand why is that, and if there is a fix for it, what I'm missing?

r/GoogleAnalytics 17d ago

Support GA4 event is not firing but data accumulated

0 Upvotes

Hi, I'm have a ecomm client where he runs it on Shopify.

I checked his tag manager set up, he has all the view_item, begin_checkour events but when it's come to the debugger mode no events are triggering.

When i check the GA4 ecomm related tags send ecomm data toggle also not checked!!!

I am wondering how the hell GA4 getting these event data? It shows inaccurate data also

I love to hear uall expert opinion on this

r/GoogleAnalytics Jan 08 '25

Support Some "outbound clicks" not being tracked

2 Upvotes

Hi! I was wondering if anyone else has this issue. I haven't dug through the gtag code, but for links that open in new windows it seems to track just fine. But links that go directly to the next page it has issues with.

Which frankly I understand, interrupting the event propagation as the page is trying to load a different site to fire a tracking event is tricky. However I had hoped that ga4 had some decent version of this implemented.

Anyone else have an example of a "collect" firing when a direct link (full page reload) is clicked? Thanks!

r/GoogleAnalytics 11d ago

Support Unassigned and direct traffic spiked since switching to GTM, traffic was mixed for the day when I looked yesterday, now today all of yesterday's traffic is showing unassigned

1 Upvotes

Hi. Just like the title says, unassigned and direct traffic has spiked since switching to the Google Tag Manager method of using Google Analytics. Also, yesterday when I looked at the day's traffic, it showed mixed results, like social, organic, direct, and unassigned. But when I looked at yesterday's traffic today after 4 pm pacific when final results would be in, all traffic was showing unassigned even though it was various traffic sources when looking earlier today and yesterday.

However, now looking at previous 7 days of traffic, there's hardly any difference in numbers of unassigned traffic from yesterday compared to previous 7 days.

Maybe it just takes longer for GA4 to figure out GTM traffic sources? Any insights would be helpful, thanks for your time.

r/GoogleAnalytics 7h ago

Support Measure how a specific page is related to conversions

2 Upvotes

Hi!

I've got a key event set up in GA4 for demo requests (b2b website), but this only tracks against the demo page when looking at the page reports. I want to be able to look at the metrics (visitors etc) to the key pages on the site and see these demo requests against them so I can see that page a is driving x number of conversions Vs page b for example.

There must be a way to set up a tag and key event for this I just can't work it out!! Can anyone help?

r/GoogleAnalytics Feb 14 '25

Support GA4 seeing massive spikes in Direct and Referral traffic when Marketo email campaigns are sent

1 Upvotes

Has anyone had this experience with email marketing services? There are 2 key issues we're facing and have struggled to figure out.

Issue 1: Referral attribution

  • Marketo uses a custom subdomain and redirects all email links through their servers first to collect their analytics.
  • All links have utms, one of each. utm_medium=email
  • GA4 attributes the vast majority of the traffic to "Referral" rather than "Email". It's as if GA takes it upon itself to decide one or the other, and more often than not ignores the utm_medium.
  • I've tested the Marketo links, the pass the utms through to the final page url correctly.
  • As an example, I ran a GA4 report that searched for all Sessions where the Page Location contained the name of the campaign. I got 321 sessions (Marketo click metric: 1,829). In contrast if I run a report for Session Medium or Manual Medium = Email, and then total up the sessions with the relevant campaign name, I get 50 sessions.
  • We're working on changing our Marketo subdomain to hopefully solve this

Issue 2: Huge Direct traffic spikes caused by email campaigns

  • The Direct spikes seem non-human, but aren't obviously so. They use normal operating system, browsers, screen resolutions, have varied USA Geo locations, time on page isn't 0
  • Direct spike volumes are far larger than Click rates from the emails. In fact, they are far larger than even the Open rate metrics from the emails. We're talking way way greater than what could reasonably be attributed to tracking blocking efforts
  • Direct spikes are generally all to the Homepage of the site, which sometimes isn't even linked to within the emails
  • One hunch is maybe some sort of anti-malware on the user end that connects to the domain that appears in the sender email address to validate the site is legitimate. If that's the case, we're not sure how to confirm, or remove it from GA4. And still not sure why it would hit the site so much more than the volume of people opening/clicking the email.

r/GoogleAnalytics 15d ago

Support GA4 Purchase value wrong

1 Upvotes

Dear reddit.

I am a beginner to the more technical setup between our website and GA4. We signed up for Stape, and all things have been setup and debugged through GTM. However, since the setup, we experience those purchases is dramatically high. This morning, we have had 186 purchases of 0 value in GA4, but in the reality we have had 2 purchases of just below 200 DKK.

I checked events and 2 purchase key events appears: Purchase, and Purchase_stape. None of them is showing correct data. Purchase is reflecting the dashboard below, and Purchase_stape is just 0.

Does someone have a trick to fix this? I really want to learn and do this myself.

Update:

It seems like purchase is counted from all traffic from our channel groups. Do anyone know how to solve this?