Hi,

First off; I realize GSC clicks and session source attributed to google in GA4 tracks different things, but I still am struggling to understand a huge discrepancy in terms of difference in increase that the two services report for a site I work on.

I compare the 28 days from 1. january 2025 until 28. january 2025 against 3. january 2024 to 30. january 2024.

GSC 2025:
Clicks: 1,75k | Total impressions 25.9k | Average CTR 6,8% | Average position 7.9

GSC 2024
Clicks: 1,55k | Total impressions 35.5k | Average CTR 4,4% | Average position 7.7

From this we can see that for this period in GSC it says there is, in terms of clicks coming to the page. Is an increase of roughly 13%. But on the other parameters it performs worse.

In GA4 I go to the landing page report and filter by session source google and filter landing page to containing the url path of the section I'm investigating.

GA4 2025
Sessions: 9200 | Active users 7700 | New users 4100

GA4 2024
Sessions 620 | Active users 500 | New users 160

If we compare "Active users", which I would guess would be the most accurate to compare against Clicks in GSC, then that's an increase of 1440%. Far greater than the 13% increase reported in GSC. It's pretty much the exact same story if I check source medium = organic instead.

I have had a consistent increase in page views, sessions and active users for many months (according to GA4) now after having rebuilt the service back in August / September.

The overall page views have roughly tripled, active users quadrupled, and page views per active user decreased from 4.3 to 2.9, but the amount of time spent on the site almost doubled. Almost all of the traffic is organic.

I'm struggling to understand how Google Analytics can say there is such an increase, while in GSC we are unable to identify any valuable changes in their metrics.

Any ideas what could be going on here or how this could be explained? It seems difficult for me to analyze further on what could give SEO improvements here, when GSC doesn't seem to agree that any noticeable improvements have been the result of any changes already done.

Again, I realize clicks in GSC is different from counting users with session source google and the relevant landing page filter. But logically it would make more sense for me if the clicks number in GSC were higher than GA4, not the other way round. And it would also make more sense to me if the percent increase was more similar than it currently is.

Hey GA4 Experts,
I'm trying to understand the nuances of the "Default Channel Group" in Google Analytics 4, specifically with regards to user segmentation.

I have a segment set up like this:

Include users when:

"Default channel group contains 'Organic Search' at any point in time"

My confusion is around whether this condition is satisfied by:

A) Any session where the user first came from organic search.

B) Any non-first interaction event within any session being associated with 'Organic Search', even if the session itself was from a different source? (my understanding is that events have their own event-scoped source parameters, but only the source parameter of the first interaction event is used to determine the session-scoped source attribution)

My confusion stems from the fact that I see "Default Channel Group" listed under Event-scoped dimensions within the Attribution category. Can someone clarify how this works in practice for segment creation?

Thanks in advance for the insights!

When people click on an organic search result from a domain that redirects (301) to another (new) domain, is this traffic still counted as 'google / organic'? This seems the most logical to me, but when I look at the changes in my Analytics, I get the impression that this is being counted as direct traffic.

Very curious if anyone has the answer to this.

In an older thread, I don't see a convincing answer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleAnalytics/comments/s13ccz/how_does_traffic_from_301_redirects_appear_in/

As far as I remember, in Universal Analytics (UA), if a user started a session from one source/medium, left the site, and then re-entered from a different source/medium, UA would start a new session even if it's within the 30-min default mark.

However, in GA4, it seems like this behavior has fundamentally changed. From my understanding:

• GA4 does not start a new session when a user returns from a different source/medium, as long as they return within 30 minutes.
• The original session source remains the same, but the new source/medium is logged at the event level (session_source, session_medium).

A new session only starts if:

• The user is inactive for 30+ minutes before coming back.
• The session crosses midnight.
• The user clears cookies or switches devices.

This is a major shift from UA’s behavior, where a new session was always created when a user returned via a different source.

Can anyone confirm if this understanding is correct? And how does this impact session-based vs. event-based reporting in GA4?

Would love to hear insights from those who’ve dug deep into GA4!

Hi everyone!

Is it normal for there to be such a big difference between the outbound clicks measured by Pinterest and the numbers recorded in Google Analytics?

Pinterest outbound clicks: 1.8K GA Views: 924 GA Sessions: 828 GA Active users: 734

They used to be pretty close, but I just realized that for a long time now, the discrepancy has been huge.

Hi there guys I'm currently doing the Data analytics certificate on Google. I'm currently on my free trial right now and then will pay $39usd per month.

I was wondering after I finish the course do I have to pay an additional fee to obtain the certificate and will I have to renew this certificate by paying a fee or will it last for the lifetime?

Thank you :)

I'd like to take a deeper look at the path customers are taking to make a purchase on a client's site. I'm getting multiple /checkouts/ or /thank-you pages - presumably an individual page for each purchase.

Wondering if anyone has any tips on compiling this into one /thank-you page for ease of reporting within GA4?

https://preview.redd.it/yq0ckn6hl7ge1.png?width=382&format=png&auto=webp&s=5db6d845658f6d041d31ad88baf2994c70dea163

Hi, I have a main website for our services and a secondary website (a subdomain) dedicated to online booking. Currently, I have two GA4 properties, but I need to track traffic moving from the main website to the booking site. For example, I’d like to know if a specific Google Ads campaign leads to a booking conversion. Would using the same GA4 property with two data streams (one for each website) be the right solution? Or would it work better using a single data stream for both websites?

The same blog post: GA 50 views vs. Post View Counter 440 views.

What the hell is going on

Hey all,
I'm trying to analyze user journeys from start to finish in terms of the pages they visit. I've tried using the 'User Explorer' in the Explorations report, but all I get are a bunch of effective user IDs. When I click on these IDs, I'm only shown a list of events like page_view, but there's no indication of which page these events correspond to.
Am I missing something obvious here? It feels like understanding which pages users navigate through is one of the most basic features of analytics. My goal is to look at the page journey across all sessions in a user journey for a given date range, not just a single session. Is there another way to do this in GA4, or am I just going about it the wrong way? Any help or tips would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

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.

Hi everyone! I launched a new website a few months ago and thought I had correctly set up an internal traffic filter, but it doesn’t appear to be working. I labeled the necessary IP addresses as “internal” and then set up a data filter to exclude all traffic coming from these IP addresses. When I test it, GA4 is still including the traffic coming from these addresses. Any ideas on how to resolve this issue?

Hey guys,

when I look into monetization I see different numbers from when I look at key event in admin tab. Conversions come from third party reservation system which is embedded on the sight through iframe, could this be the problem?

Could you guys tell which number is more likely to be correct?

Hey everyone,
Does anyone know if key event metrics in the 'Engagement > Landing page' report in GA4 are associated with the specific landing page directly, or simply there because they occurred during the same session that was initiated by the corresponding landing page? Can't find anything about this in the GA4 documentation.
Thanks!

Do you know how to calculate average Engagement Time by Page using GA4 available metrics in Looker Studio?

Hi
When using GA4's report builder extension for Google Sheets I have an issue when I try to schedule a report.

https://preview.redd.it/9vww0qgnlwfe1.png?width=846&format=png&auto=webp&s=e85c2676a7bed14dc3b7c0710e1e83a793090b63

It appears it only works if I use the every our option.

https://preview.redd.it/dwvs7bwulwfe1.png?width=303&format=png&auto=webp&s=d45bd141f2aa11b2636a85a83561cc907cf3a05f

Have you found any issue with this functionality?

Thank you.

Thanks for the help!

Hello , anyone knows how i can get a report for the parameters that are sent with each event without having to do one event at a time ?

As the title suggests basically I am running an Ad on tik tok and while I have been getting multiple website views I am getting zero data on my analytics other than website view. I inspected the website and it is saying analytics and microsoft clarity are being blocked by client which in this case I am assuming is the tik tok browser extention.

Anyone know how to resolve this really need help?

I just setup my website yesterday and GA dashboard pretty much always shows traffic from ashburn, VA even at random hours of the day when I wouldn't expect to have visitors - could this be because my aws lambdas run in the us-east-1 region or are these actual users?

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?

I have spent the past 6 hours trying to figure out how to filter data using Metrics while creating dashboards. Essentially, I want to create a dashboard that shows users with high engagement (i.e., user engagement > 60 seconds and engagement rate > 30%).

I tried using the Explore option, but it only creates a single table. What I need are 4 summary cards, a geo map, a table, and a line graph.

I also explored Looker Studio, but it seems that whenever I apply these filters, I get a "no data" error.

Please help!

We have 3 domains in the same GA account with cross domain tracking, users may travel between the first two, and convert on the third domain. My problem is when I have to make session based reports by one of the domains only. We want to know what traffic sources brought traffic to that specific domain. I know that hostname is only event-scoped and not session-scoped, and I've seen some crazy duplicate metrics from landing pages having every hostname in that session.

One way is to look at the session_start event so a hostname filter can work on an event scope. But I've read that session_start is unreliable and counted differently than the session metric. So it doesn't match up with our other session reporting. So is there ANY WAY to view session data segregated by the hostname of the landing page? Because GA4 doesn't include the domain name in their landing page dimension, they have made it even harder.

Take a look at these 3 columns for our session channels.

1. sessions: filter by hostname, event=session_start
2. event count: filter by hostname, event=session_start
3. sessions: filter by hostname only
   (Note: this seems equivalent to looking at sessions filtered by page location including the hostname)

https://preview.redd.it/vio0i9un5mfe1.png?width=750&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f0f65249c42245efe6f89c6e6ce60aadaf0b728

What's the most alarming is the discrepancy with Organic Search, Referral, and Unassigned which aren't remotely similar numbers.

So is there any reliable, trustworthy way for me to see what sources brought how many sessions to specific hostnames? Which method should I trust?

(p.s. we are backing up to BigQuery, but no expertise in pulling this kind of data).

If anyone knows anyone in GA4 development, please ask them to add the domain name to the Landing Page dimension!!!

Thanks,

Jan

Hello,

Realtime overview shows 800-1000 active users in last 30 minutes which is too much.

Our usual numbers are from 150-220 and we don't have new active campaigns which would create such traffic. Our peak was black friday with 450 active users.

Do you have similar issue?

That's what's happening to me. I can't seem to wrap my head around this one. (Tough to search as well as all results seem to think that Debug View isn't working, or nothing is working.)

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?

I'm using Cloudflare, and their built-in Zaraz to implement Analytics. I find that to load considerably faster, and it's free.

Using Zaraz, I'm pretty sure that I'm sending 2 custom variables. But I don't see anywhere in any of the reports to view the data from those custom variables.

Do I need to do something on Analytics' end to recognize the custom variable names, or am I overlooking how to find it in the reports?