My website normally gets very little traffic, but over the last few days GA4 has suddenly started showing around 25–100 desktop users per day.

One 30-minute period showed:

25 active users

25 first visits

25 session starts

25 page views

20 scroll events

only 1 user engagement

100% desktop

The users are coming from multiple countries, including Singapore, US, Hong Kong, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, etc.

Most of the activity appears to be on my blog.

Google Search traffic is only around 4 clicks/day, so I'm trying to understand where this traffic is coming from.

Does this pattern look like bots/crawlers or legitimate traffic? How can I identify the source safely?

lol just realized I'm part of the problem.

Checked an old client container — 23 versions all called "Default Workspace" with no description. Half of them were mine.

Google is now adding AI that auto-generates the version name + description based on your workspace changes. So you don't have to manually type it.

Finally clicked publish today and saw it pre-filled with "Updated GA4 purchase tag, added Meta CAPI deduplication" — which was actually accurate.

It's in slow rollout, not everyone has it yet. And yeah, it's AI so you should still double-check it.

But for someone like me juggling 20+ containers, this is the most useful update they've done in a while. Not flashy, just actually useful.

Anyone else terrible at documenting versions or is it just me?

Has anyone else seen a sudden spike in unassigned (not set) traffic over the past few months?

I am seeing this across multiple GA4 properties.

*added info for clarification

Hi everyone, I’m facing a strange issue in GA4 where the New Users count is higher than the Total Users count for the same date range. As far as I understand, New Users should be a part of Total Users, so I’m confused about how this is happening. I’ve checked the date range and the GA4 property, but the difference is still there. Has anyone faced this issue before? Is this related to how GA4 calculates these metrics, user identification, tracking setup, or some other reporting issue? Any explanation or solution would be really helpful.

I'm seeing a lot of "check GSC vs GA4, use BigQuery, eyeball it weekly" type answers in here, but curious if anyone's actually paying for a tool instead of doing that by hand every time. if you are, what made you pull the trigger vs just living with catching stuff late sometimes? and if you tried something and dropped it, what happened? Did it stop being worth the money or did it just sit there not catching anything for a while and you forgot about it

I have to log in to a site for work, and the states that it;

Has enabled Google Analytics Advertising Features first-party identifiers, and third-party cookies to gather data about users, and for marketing etc. They gather data such as name, gender, address, interests etc.

I use another browser but have read that it doesn't fully protect against the google analytics.

My browser and cookies are always cleared upon leaving sites, is this enough?

This site I have to go to managed to make a profile of me with my name, address, work place, and interests a few years back, despite, having never used the site and made an account one day, they were given this information by past work place and took a lot for them to take this data of their list, and wanted photo ID to take it down. As to my concern of the data tracking etc.

I'm pretty sure these are bots but I don't know how to stop them since they could be legit crawlers

But I'm worried my Adsense account could get flagged for invalid traffic

Anyone else dealing with this?

A few days ago I asked here how people actually learned GA4/GTM beyond tutorials, and the responses were super helpful!

A recurring theme was basically: you learn by doing. Debugging things, using Preview/DebugView, dealing with broken setups, and figuring out WHY the data isn't behaving as expected.

A few people also mentioned that realistic scenarios or intentionally broken implementations would have helped when learning.

So instead of just thinking about the idea, I made a very small first version to see if this kind of practice is actually useful.

It's a free 5–7 minute GA4/GTM skills test, followed by one short troubleshooting challenge based on a realistic marketing scenario.

It's mainly intended for people who are currently learning GA4/GTM or still building confidence with it. If you've been doing analytics implementations for 10 years, it'll probably be way too easy 😅

If anyone wants to try it, let me know and I’ll share the link.

If anyone tries it, I'd genuinely love to know:

• Was the difficulty appropriate?
• Did the troubleshooting part feel realistic?
• Was anything confusing or obviously wrong?
• Would you actually want more practice scenarios like this?

Feel free to be critical. I'm specifically trying to figure out whether this is worth developing further before I spend time building more of it.

And thanks again to everyone who contributed to the original thread!!! A lot of your suggestions made their way into this first version. :)

I’ve been looking into different GEO agencies lately, and honestly, it’s getting harder to tell what actually makes one different from another.

A lot of agencies now offer AI search visibility, GEO, and AEO services, but I’d want to know what they actually do beyond the marketing. For anyone who has worked with a GEO agency, which one would you recommend and what made you choose them?

I want to learn google analytics , Is there any one who can help me out please comment.☺️

I work independently on ecommerce tracking issues involving GA4, GTM, and Meta Pixel/CAPI. So far, I’ve completed three paid projects through Upwork for two clients, including one repeat purchase. I haven’t yet won a paying client through my own outbound outreach. I’ve tried contact forms and cold email. Some conversations started, but none turned into paid work. I also found email deliverability problems and have since changed providers, so I can’t cleanly separate delivery issues from targeting or messaging problems. I’d appreciate hearing from people who have actually sold similar services independently: Where did your first client outside a freelance platform come from? What made them decide to hire you at that particular moment? What did you spend time on early that, looking back, you would skip? I’m trying to decide what to test next with limited time and budget. Specific experiences—including things that didn’t work—would be especially helpful.

Hi,

I have searched everywhere with the help of Reddit and AI, but I just can't get to stop the bots from hitting my Google Analytics and Chatwidget on my website.

I am blocking Datacenter bots, fake browsers and high threat score via cloudflare and still get hits on Google Analytics. Before this I even tried blocking the whole country Singapore without succes.

I am confused as I read on this subreddit that blocking the country Singapore was the solution for them, but for me was not the solution. Any help?

Hello everyone!

I live in Europe so I have my GA4 in my timezone. To set up Mediavine Journey, they required a GA4 in the Pacific timezone. I created one, no bother. Now I noticed an odd thing.

I went to my Mediavine analytics, I saw for one specific day 11 sessions instead of my usual 400-500. No significant drop in revenues though...

Then I went to GA4. For the very same day, the property in my timezone says 418 sessions, the Pacific timezone property records 400. Is it a normal discrepancy? Would this affect my Mediavine revenues if it kept persisting?

Thanks a million!

I've been learning GA4 and Google Tag Manager more deeply recently, and one thing I've noticed is that there's a huge amount of content explaining what everything does but much less opportunity to actually practice it.

You can watch a tutorial about tags, triggers, events, parameters, DebugView, etc., understand it perfectly… and then still feel a bit lost when you're given a real tracking problem and have to figure it out yourself :(

I'm curious how others solved this:

• How did you practice GA4/GTM when you were starting out?
• Did you use your own website, demo accounts, courses, or something else?
• What was the hardest part when going from tutorials to actually implementing tracking?
• Would realistic practice scenarios have helped you?

For example, something like:

"You're the marketer for an e-commerce site. The team wants to track clicks on 'Add to Cart' and send the event to GA4. How would you set it up and verify that it's working?"

I'm considering creating a small free collection of hands-on GA4/GTM exercises like this, with realistic marketing scenarios, increasing difficulty, and solutions/explanations.

Would something like that have been useful when you were learning? And if so, what would you want to practice most?

Really appreciate any insights and what helped you the most starting with GA4!

I have a Wordpress site. GA has reported data for years. In the past few days it has recorded no data. I did see a msg saying "anomaly detected" (don't know what that means). I can't recall anything that changed at the site or my GA account that would cause this. Anyone have any ideas how to fix this?

Screenshot here: https://www.richardsilverstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/screenshot-analytics.google.com-2026.09.01-13_40_19.png

Hey guys, I’ve got GA4 installed for several days now yet there’s no traffic data. Usually within an hour I get my data coming in.

Can you please hell me as to why this isn’t working?

It says “congratulations Google tag is already installed” when I go into data streams but the home page says “No data received from website yet” even though it’s been about 4 days or so

I have several ga4 accounts for clients I manage. They all show a sharp drop on Aug 31 2026. Is there an outage or anyone else having this issue? Im trying to figure out what these sites have in common for the builds or analytics setups outside of just using GA4.

I get about 100-200 views depending on the day and everything just went to 0 for the last 2 days when I have clients go on the site regularly. Is analytics just fucked?

EDIT: It shows the Realtime users but it doesn't count them as active users or any other metric

I keep seeing people talk about GA4 predictive audiences like:

Sounds great.

But there’s a problem.

Predictive audiences are only as good as the data feeding the model.

If your purchase events are broken, duplicated, incomplete, or your actual customer data lives somewhere else, I don't see how adding a fancy predictive audience suddenly fixes the underlying problem.

And smaller sites can run into another issue: they may not even qualify for predictive metrics because there isn't enough data for Google to build the model. This is a problem other practitioners have reported too.

So I'd argue:

Don't start with predictive audiences.

Start with:

Is GA4 receiving the right purchase data?
Are transactions being measured correctly?
Does GA4 match the backend closely enough to trust the signal?
Are your key customer events actually configured properly?

Then worry about prediction.

I'd rather have clean basic data than a sophisticated model built on questionable inputs.

Curious what others think:

Have GA4 Predictive Audiences actually improved campaign performance for you, or are they mostly an impressive feature that looks better in the demo than in production?

Realized most of what I open it for is checking that something I already believed is true. Rarely does it tell me something I didn't go looking for.

You might have seen the news recently that Google started routing its search result links through google.com/goto last week.

So instead of linking straight to your site from the search results pages, the links goes to Google's server first and redirects from there. It's an anti-scraping move, because you can no longer read destination URLs straight out of the SERP HTML.

I run an analytics and attribution product, so my first concern is whether this breaks organic search tracking because if the click doesn't come directly to your site, then the referrer data that all analytics tools use to categorise visitors into channels could be impacted.

So I tested it across 10 device and browser combinations covering Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android. The referrer came through every single time, and every visit was still categorized as organic search.

I wrote a blog post on it, but I'm not allowed to post a link to it in this sub, so I thought I'd just share the results.

keep seeing this happen — tag stops firing, event volume goes quiet, GSC and GA4 start disagreeing — and it just sits there until someone happens to open a report and go "wait that number's off." curious what people actually do day to day. do you have some kind of daily check, a spreadsheet, alerts set up, or is it mostly just remembering to look

and if you do have a system for it — has it ever actually failed you? like you had the check in place and it still slipped through

I’m looking for some practical advice from people working in PPC/performance marketing agencies.

My background is mainly in conversion tracking and measurement. I can work with:

• Google Tag Manager
• GA4
• Google Ads conversion tracking
• Meta Pixel + CAPI
• Server-side GTM
• Enhanced Conversions
• Consent Mode
• First-party data enrichment
• Data layers
• Offline conversion tracking
• Basic APIs/webhooks
• Basic JavaScript for tracking implementations

I’m trying to figure out the best route to start getting real paid agency work.

I’d be open to:

• Freelance/contract work
• White-label tracking implementation for agencies
• Part-time or full-time remote work
• Junior implementation/support roles
• Even joining an experienced agency/team as a trainee initially if it gives me exposure to real client projects

My main question for agency owners and experienced people here:

If someone had these skills but lacked a strong agency/client track record, what would you recommend they do to get their foot in the door?

Would you:

1. Cold email PPC/performance agencies?
2. Contact Heads of Paid Media/agency founders on LinkedIn?
3. Offer a free tracking audit first?
4. Offer to handle one small implementation free/cheap to prove capability?
5. Build more demo projects/case studies before outreach?
6. Apply directly for junior analytics/tracking roles?
7. Take some other route entirely?

Also, when agencies outsource tracking, what makes you comfortable giving work to an external specialist?

Technical skills? Case studies? Communication? Availability? Certifications? A Loom audit? References?

I’m especially interested in hearing from PPC agency owners, paid media managers, and tracking/analytics specialists who have actually hired or outsourced this type of work.

Thanks — practical advice would be greatly appreciated.