I've been doing a bunch of research on GA4 alternatives and I think I have a pretty good list. Was actually thinking of maybe publishing my research for others in the future because it gets asked so often, am I missing any?

Overtracking
Plausible Analytics
Simple Analytics
Fathom Analytics
Seal Metrics
Matomo
Pirsch Analytics
Wide Angle Analytics
Umami
Clicky
Hotjar
Parsely
Piwik
TripleWhale
PolarAnalytics

I’ve discovered that one of the main causes of (not set) appearing for landing pages in Google Analytics is self-referral. This happens when a new session starts while someone is already on your site or when a visitor is referred from a subdomain of your site.

I'd like to have a report like this:

Organic Search Query - Amount of key events (A) - Amount of key events (B).

I realized, that in GA4 I can't get any reports like that - the Queries are not connected to analytical data.

I tried Looker Studio: I added 2 sources GA4 and Google Search Console and tried to blend the data. The problem here is that I need to Join 2 tables, but there are no suitable fields for joining condition: GSP provides Date, Landing page, and Query, but GA4 provides only Date and Landing page - there is no Query field, so the joining conditions isnt full enough.

So is there any way I can see amount of conversions attributed to an Organic Search Query?

Thank you!

Hello everyone.

I've been trying to find the best way to track form submissions. I wanted to go with GTA4 Enhanced measurements, but I've read some articles saying the data collected was way off and setting up GTM was the best way.

Is this still the case?

Thank you!

Hi!

I'm trying to filter users by their tenants (client name) and possibly other data layer values in the future.
Context: It's an online SAAS where all the users are logged in, and each user has a data layer with information like their tenant, role, ID, etc.

I'm trying to set up a tag in Google Tag Manager and later filter it out in Google Analytics, however it proves to be more difficult than it should be. How would you approach this, which solutions would you use to do it?

I'm currently experimenting with creating an event tag for each client separately, but Google Analytics seems to have a hard time in displaying this data for some reason. I tried creating custom audiences but it didn't really help.

Thanks so much for any advice, or even pointing me in the right direction.

I can't figure this out in GA4.

I want to create a report where I can view at a glance a series of metrics (Pageviews, avg. time on page, etc) for a number of select webpages on my site. I've tried doing this as an Exploration using "Segments" where each segment is assigned to each page but I can't add more than four segments (the number of pages I want to track is more than that and will grow with time).

Is there a simpler way to do this? Am I missing something obvious? If this additional information helps, I am creating new blog posts regularly and want to track them over time. They have unique page paths.

Based on how we handle analytics scripting, we load GTM with a GA4 key tag and then load that same GA4 key directly with GA4 scripting.

From top to bottom in our header, we load GA4 into the page and then GTM.

We have GA4 purchase events that fire on receipt pages, but they are not making it to our GA4 account.

I moved our GA4 scripting to the bottom of the header. So, now GTM is loaded into the page before GA4.

Now, we are seeing purchase events properly flow into our GA4 account.

Has anyone else ran into an issue like this?

Additional info, this issue began late July 2024/August 2024 - right around when Universal Analytics was official decommissioned. Maybe not related, but I thought the correlation was odd and worth mentioning.

As descriptions says-- we are noticing that our GA4 landing page report has the exact same total pageviews as the page path +query string report that we have. These are obviously two separate dimensions-- why are they reporting the same metrics? Assuming our users see 2 pages per session on our website, we should expect to see 2x more total pageviews than landing pageviews-- what gives?

Afternoon everyone,

Brief into into what i do... I work across 4 different websites and it seems like two of my websites google analytics data has become entangled. for example im getting website 2 data and website 1 data showing up in my most popular pages on my website 2 google analytics properly and the same the other way round.

Any ideas?

Hey there,

I work in e-commerce and realized that several websites I work with get lots of traffic from a city that's an IXP location. The traffic from that city is way above average, so this can't be organic, and my guess is that this has to do with the IXP. I tried filtering it out by device, OS and much more, but to no avail.

So, I guess I have 3 questions:

• Are those sessions real users, and due to cookies or whatever they just get shown with this city as a location?
• Is there any way to filter out this traffic, so I can only see the "real" traffic from that city?
• Is there a way to segment them, so I have the "real" traffic and the "IXP traffic"?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Traffic attribution

I'm working with a B2C lead-gen account. The website is built on a custom CMS, and we're using SST (not TAGGRS) alongside Cookiebot for CMP. Our Google Ads setup includes a tracking template, so UTM parameters are consistently present, and traffic attribution seems to be working fine overall.

The Problem
We track conversions when users submit a form, triggering a "formsubmit" event. However, attribution for these conversions is poor; about 90% of them show up as "not set.

Event attribution

I've checked the setup, and the Google Tag fires before the conversion occurs. There are no duplicate events, and I don’t think redirects are causing the issue either.

I know it is our SST set-up, because I checked when this problem occured and this happened after switching to SST. I think session_id, user_id and source are all present:

https://preview.redd.it/ier8egjp9gzd1.png?width=1034&format=png&auto=webp&s=3ed516aeea55ce9d08ebb00f52fb31410bef9b50

Any ideas on what we could look into to fix this?

Hi everyone,

I’m analyzing our GA4 data in BigQuery to understand daily user behavior. However, I’ve noticed that the costs are much higher when using BigQuery’s streaming option in GA4 (as opposed to a daily batch load), likely due to the additional streaming charges.

Our service generates around 50 million user events daily, which exceeds the daily batch load limit, so we had to use the streaming option. Our current cost breakdown for BigQuery is roughly streaming: loading: analyzing = 20: 10: 1.

Are there any best practices, or alternative methods, to reduce the cost of streaming and loading data into BigQuery? I couldn’t find specific documentation, so any advice would be appreciated!

Thank you!

ps. GPT translated.

https://preview.redd.it/ofqwht46gezd1.png?width=653&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c82b9ab2903ebf5062d126140a306653581bc01

Our team currently utilizes LookerStudio/BQ and I am curious if there are better paid, and or free software options as of late that specialize in building sales/revenue reports.

Has anyone identified the new chatgpt search function referrer domain to be able to isolate traffic from that source? I have seen something about gpt auto appending utm codes to links coming from search, anyone able to confirm that?

Is it possible to see views or clicks on a site using Google Analytics without having access to the site?

Looking to switch career paths. I have a terminal degree (PhD) in philosophy but unfortunately after my first teaching contract haven’t been able to land another gig.

I am now taking a digital analytics course via coursera.

What I keep seeing on here is that folks, like me, without a degree in data/computer science, etc. will have trouble transitioning to an entry level role.

The question: Is there a streamlined pathway on coursera that leads to the completion of a degree program? Or should I just complete these courses and use them to create a portfolio which hopefully becomes a job?

Any other career advice or recommendations are appreciated.

I'm putting a QR code on a restaurant receipt that links directly to the Google review page for the restaurant's Google Business listing.

How do I track scans of this QR code in Google Analytics?

I tried a 301 redirect through my own website (point the QR code to my own website, and then doing a 301 redirect to the Google Review page, but that isn't being captured in GA4 -- server side redirect before GA4 can capture data).

I can use a third-party QR code generator to capture scan counts, but I'd rather have the data go through Google Analytics to make reporting easier, plus I don't like the idea of having a third-party in control of my URLs.

Any other thoughts?

Hi there,

This is not a Google Analytics question, but it concerns web analytics, so I hope you still can help me.

Since begin of October we see a lot of referral traffic from the referrer link.perfectlink.ai. Is started with just few hundred sessions each day but now we are at roughly 10000 sessions a day which messes up our stats quite a bit.

Most of this traffic ignores our cookie consent popup, which is why we see only a very small percentage in GA4. But we have another web analytics tool which allows privacy-compliant tracking of all traffic and there we see all this traffic.

The traffic all goes to the homepage and the bounce rate is around 98%, which would normally indicate bot traffic. But apart from the bounce rate the traffic looks fairly normal - the IP-addresses vary a lot (retrieved from our server logs) and the distribution of user agents, screen sizes or browser language settings is roughly the same as for our other users.

I could simply exclude this referrer from our reporting, but I am wondering whether it might be some misconfigured adserver or similar which might also be used for legit purposes. Therefore I thought I would check here first.

Does one of you maybe know where this traffic comes from or has seen this referrer in their own data?

Thanks

Claudia

What could "an / paid" stand for? It's a session source / medium, but which?

I have no idea what "an" could be. I run paid youtube, google search, facebook, instagram and app store ads. All "an / paid" traffic is on a mobile device.

All of my paid traffic sources are listed in the session source / medium list, except the app store ads. But app store ads don't link to my website so I don't that would be it.

However, I don't run any other paid ads, I'm at a loss. It's my biggest traffic source.

I’m running an e-commerce website that mostly brings in traffic through organic SEO from Google, and I’m hoping to find a more user-friendly way to get a quick, insightful overview of our Google Analytics data, especially with GA4 being a bit overwhelming at times.

Ideally, I’m looking for something that’s free and can help simplify the basics. I’d love to get a clear picture of our overall traffic, conversions, revenue, and which pages are performing well or need improvement, without getting bogged down in too many details. I'm open to any suggestions on tools, plug-ins, or even specific setups in GA4 that could help make the process smoother.

With all the new AI-driven tools and dashboards out there, I figured there must be something that can offer the essential insights in a straightforward way. Any advice or experiences with tools that make it easy to get a high-level understanding of performance would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!

Hi there! I've been transferring G4 analytics data from the dashboard to an external platform for easier ongoing analysis (Airtable) and it seems like G4's data is often inconsistent when running daily reports vs long term reports.

This is just one example but for one site I'm tracking active users. Because I want to create reports diving into weekday/weekend differences, I've manually transferred active user number into an Airtable base on a date by date basis (1/1/24- 10, 1/2/24 - 24, etc.) Tallying that data gave me 14,942 users from 1/1/24-11/2/24. But if I run a report from 1/1-11/2 in G4 it says there's only 11K active users. Meanwhile if I break it down instead and run monthly reports in G4 and then add that up it gives me 12.7K active users.

I suppose you could say that the difference between reports is users over night being counted twice in the daily reports, but I don't think that lines up with the monthly/yearly discrepancy. What gives?

Hi guys, I was wondering if anyone have tried to add GA to notion which shows the reports directly on a notion database? Without using any external apps.

I have tried rows/.com and it is working fine but I was hoping to remove any external apps and just do everything on the notion.

I’m stuck using the API so no big query access.

I’m trying to find the Effective User ID and have read that this could be the Device ID And / or Google signals.

Is there a field in the API I’m missing? Or should I just pick up the device ID?

https://preview.redd.it/ioq1wwnldoyd1.jpg?width=1377&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2d2253673d27ec3631e4dea36a31c820ac4c92f4

Hi there. Can someone explain this to me?

I'm new to the new Google Analytics G4A. I went to the conversion and saw this.

Hello guys, I am new to Google Analytics and do not know if I am asking the right question, but I hope someone can explain it to me.

So, I have launched advertising campaigns yesterday and I was regularly checking the analytics all day. It used to say that there were 185 active users in the last 30 minutes, after 2 hours it was like approximately 200 active users in last 30 minutes and so on, all day it was in the range of 150-200 active users in the past half an hour report.

Today I open analytics to check the yesterday’s traffic and it says there were only 16 users. What’s wrong? For at least 10 hours checking it used to say minimum 150 active users and now, the day’s full report says 16 users. Am I missing something or understand wrongly?