In the world of digital marketing, data is king. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) stands as a powerful tool, offering top-of-the-line attribution modelling to understand the customer journey and optimise your marketing ROI. The key point to note is that it is not the golden bullet, we shouldn’t be chasing the impossible dream of a single, perfect data source that captures every click, every user and every transaction.
The digital landscape is changing. Data privacy concerns, GDPR regulations, cookie consent policies, ad blockers, and even browser-specific tracking prevention (like Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention), without even mentioning GA4 data thresholding or data sampling, all contribute to a reality where 100% data capture or visibility is simply not feasible.
A lot of people tend to think of GA4 as a source of complete truth. That every user that visits your website, every interaction they make and every conversion they trigger will be recorded on the platform and it will match 100% with our internal database. This is simply not the case. If we’re respecting user privacy (as we should), if users use ad blockers, or reject cookies, if your website has a very high traffic, or if you’re looking at a very small subset of users in a report, there will be gaps in our data. Because of that we shouldn’t consider all data on GA4 as gospel, but we should start thinking about it as our analytics and marketing compass, guiding you through the complexities of user behaviour and campaign performance. It excels at attributing conversions to specific platforms and campaigns, giving us a clear view of how our marketing efforts translate into tangible results.
Imagine this: You launch a new product with a multi-faceted campaign spanning social media, paid search, and email marketing. GA4 allows you to see, with granular detail, how each of these channels contributes to your overall conversion goals. This level of attribution clarity empowers you to make data-driven decisions, optimising your budget allocation and refining your strategies for maximum impact. Therein lies the true power of GA4.
The most common queries we see from users who have multiple analytics or marketing platforms are:
“Why is there a discrepancy between my Universal Analytics (RIP) data and my GA4 data?”
“Why doesn’t it match BigQuery?”
“Why doesn’t it match <insert other platform here>?”
Every one of those questions has a different answer, but they also have an overall common reason: We shouldn’t expect data from different platforms to match against each other. Even within GA4 data from Reports and Explorations can be different, and that is by design. Google explains why this difference may occur in its documentation (link). It also highlights differences between the data in GA4 UI, GA Data API and BigQuery (link).
Regarding why your data in UA looks different from your GA4, well, there are again multiple reasons why this happens. Google’s documentation highlights a few (link), and there are many sources explaining what to expect when comparing the two.
I could continue to list out why data on platform Y doesn’t match with data on platform Z, but there are too many to go through all of them. The key takeaway regarding this topic is that there is no discrepancy between data in most of those platforms. According to the Oxford Dictionary a discrepancy is “a difference between two or more things that should be the same”. Given that data in different platforms is collected differently, aggregated differently and serves a different purpose, it will not be exactly the same. It’s different by design. And that is ok.
While GA4 (and other Google Marketing Platform solutions) can’t defy the laws of data privacy, they do offer innovative solutions to counter the challenges of incomplete data:
At Space & Time, we specialise in GA4 and GTM implementation, Consent Mode, Enhanced Conversions, Server Side tagging, creating insightful dashboards in Looker Studio, data warehousing in BigQuery, and marketing capabilities in numerous social and paid platforms. Contact us at technology@spaceandtime.co.uk to unlock the full potential of your data and drive smarter marketing decisions.