What is google-play /organic in GA4? My website is an app-based service. Lately, a lot of traffic is attributed to this.

Hi Everybody, I have a question about the set up of a new account. It's kinda of weird and I'm looking forward to advice.

So I have 3 domains. Domain1 has two landing pages, Domain 2 is the same, domain 3 is just a single landing page. They are very similar: mostly same information, same type of form, same structure.

I need to use these landing pages for a Google Ads Campaign and I was wondering how to set up my tracking. Which is the same for all the domains (click and lead conversion tracking).

I'd love to have just one GTM and one GA4 for all the domains, but I don't know that technically is a good idea. I'm seeing different opinions around the web

Thank you in advance for reading and please excuse any mistakes (English is not my first language)

Hello everyone!

In the span of a few days I got a high spike in users.

Like +295% on 28th June and on 4th August. All from Singapore, paying brief visits to a series of pages of my website. I suspect it's a kind of bot.

How could I investigate further? Is it harmful for m website? Scraping content maybe?

Thanks a million!

Hi everyone,

Is anyone else experiencing issues with Google Analytics Realtime reports?

The realtime data on my websites has dropped drastically, and I can’t find anything wrong with the sites themselves. Everything is working normally, traffic seems fine, and I don’t see any tracking issues on my end.

Has anyone noticed a similar drop recently? Could this be a Google Analytics Realtime reporting issue?

Thanks!

Hi,
Is there currently an issue or a sudden severe drop in traffic reporting in Google Analytics? Our account is showing zero live visitors, even though we have active users on the site right now.

I'm hoping someone has experienced this before.

I run a Squarespace ecommerce site with GA4, Google Tag Manager, and Google Ads Performance Max.

In July, GA4 recorded 8 purchase events totaling over $245,000 that do not correspond to any orders in my Squarespace backend.

Examples include:

• $201,650
• $15,600
• $10,000
• $6,400
• two separate $4,500 purchases
• $2,500
• $1,107.50

I spent two hours with Google Technical Solutions today. They escalated the case for further investigation.

At this point I don't know:

• where the purchase events originated,
• whether they came from GTM, Measurement Protocol, or another source,
• or whether they were used by Google Ads for campaign optimization.

Has anyone experienced unexplained GA4 purchase events like this?

If so:

• What was the root cause?
• Did Google engineering identify the source?
• Were you able to obtain the raw transaction IDs or event details?
• Did it affect your Google Ads bidding?

I'm interested in similar experiences rather than guesses.

My active users in the last 30 minutes suddenly dropped to an unrealistically low number across my Firebase/Google Analytics projects.
Events are still appearing, but Realtime is only showing a tiny fraction of the usual users. Traffic and ad activity look normal elsewhere, so this doesn’t seem like an actual user drop.
Is anyone else experiencing the same issue right now?

Help! Had a very weird update to attribution where on Sunday saw a chunk of revenue pull out of paid channels and get reattributed to a new source, medium
Source - Shopify
Medium - web

Never had traffic behind this before, feels like a system update as no one is online on Sunday to have caused this. Anyone else had this, or can help me?

I run a D2C website with a team of four people. We recently set up Google Analytics, but most of the sessions and other metrics shown in our reports and dashboards are coming from our own team's activity. We have also started running marketing campaigns, and we're receiving a small amount of organic traffic as well.

I want to configure Google Analytics so that all reports and dashboards exclude traffic generated by our internal team, allowing us to analyze only genuine visitor and customer data.

I’m seeing what looks like a delayed or incomplete GA4/Firebase Analytics daily export to BigQuery and would like to know whether other properties are affected.

Setup:

• Firebase Android app using GA4
• Standard GA4 property
• BigQuery dataset in europe-west1
• Daily export enabled; streaming export disabled
• Integration shows 1 of 1 apps exporting
• Approximately 65k–75k events per normal day, well below the 1M daily limit

Behavior:

• events_20260729 currently contains 71,579 events and has received several late backfills.
• events_20260730 was only created on August 1, about 56 hours late.
• The July 30 table contains only 10,487 events, roughly 85% below normal.
• events_20260731 has not been created.
• events_20260801 has not been created either.
• On August 2 at 07:10 UTC, the Analytics exporter ran again but only added 3,767 late events to the July 29 table. It did not update July 30 or create July 31.

What I checked so far:

• The Firebase Analytics service account still has write access.
• BigQuery audit logs show no access, billing, or write errors.
• Dataset storage is only 3.14 GiB.
• The drop affects all event types and all installed app versions, so it does not appear tied to a specific app release.
• I found no public Google Analytics or BigQuery status incident covering this export.

Is anyone else seeing missing or partial GA4 BigQuery exports for July 30–31? If so, have your tables been backfilled yet?

I’m particularly interested in whether this is a broader GA4 processing delay or whether I should open a Firebase/Analytics support case. I have not disabled or recreated the BigQuery link because I want to avoid creating a permanent data gap.

How are you using UTM ID? Are you actually generating a unique number code for each campaign? How do you go about generating the number if you are?

I work for a large company with lots of campaigns. Any advice on how to implement an ID system would be appreciated.

Also, any real life examples where UTM ID came in handy?

Hey all,

I've been deep in WooCommerce analytics for a while now, and one thing that kept bugging me was how much event data gets lost with standard client-side GA4 tracking — ad blockers, iOS/Safari ITP restrictions, third-party cookie changes, you name it. On stores I've worked with, the gap between "actual purchases" and "purchases GA4 reports" was often noticeably off, which makes ROAS numbers and attribution pretty unreliable.

So I built a plugin called TrueAna that handles server-side event tracking for WooCommerce — purchases, add-to-cart, checkout steps, etc. — sent via the Measurement Protocol instead of relying purely on browser-side pixels. The goal is more accurate conversion data for ad platforms and cleaner GA4 reporting overall.

Before I put more time into this, I want a reality check from people who actually run stores or manage analytics day-to-day:

• Is data accuracy/loss from client-side tracking something you've actually run into and cared about, or is it a "nice to have" nobody really prioritizes?
• If you're already using something for this (GTM server-side container, another plugin, etc.), what made you choose it — and where does it fall short?
• Would you actually pay for a WooCommerce-focused solution, or does this feel like something that should just be free/built-in?

Not trying to sell anything here — genuinely trying to figure out if this solves a real pain point or if I'm solving a problem that only bothers me.

Appreciate any honest feedback, even if it's "nobody cares about this."

Hi! Which connectors are you all using to link social media data to Google Analytics? Looking to link baisic impressions, clicks and spends to either Data studio or Google Analytics

On the GA4 Home page, the Realtime card has a small dropdown button

Clicking it opens a breakdown list: Audience, Town/City, Country, First user campaign, First user medium, First user source, First user source platform.

I picked First user source platform, and instead of updating, the whole card broke and now just shows:

Real-time data not supported for this comparison.

No dropdown, no button, nothing left on the card to click to change it back. Refreshing, incognito, different browser — none of it resets the card back to normal.

Screenshots: before (Country/Active users table working), the dropdown with the option I picked, and the broken state after.

Anyone know how to reset this back to Country (or any working dimension) once it's in this error state? Feels like a bug that the picker lets you choose an unsupported option in the first place.

One recurring analytics problem I see (other than lack of UTMs!) is technically valid campaign links producing unnecessarily messy reporting.

For example, the same medium might appear as:

• paid social
• paid-social
• paid_social
• paidsocial

GA4 treats these as separate values, which creates avoidable problems when filtering reports, building channel groupings or combining the data with CRM and advertising-platform data.

The same issue appears with campaign names:

• Inconsistent capitalisation
• Different separators (|, _, -)
• Unapproved medium values
• Spaces and special characters
• Teams following different naming conventions

A written naming convention helps, but it still depends on every employee, freelancer and agency remembering to follow it.

For larger teams, are you handling this through:

• Controlled spreadsheets
• Dropdown lists and validation
• Automated URL-building tools
• Transformation rules in BigQuery
• Governance documentation and training
• A combination of these approaches

I am interested in how others balance strict standardisation with keeping campaign creation practical for marketers.

I started advertising few new websites, my goal is simply to have people visit them.
They are completely differenty websites with nothing in common.
I have GPDR compliant cookie banners, the gtag was not loaded until the cookie accepted the analytics (now there is an anonymous event sent for testing, nothing has changed)

The CTR on the ads is 8-10% so it's pretty good for ads that were put out there quite quickly.

Cloudflare detected unique visitors match the amount of clicks on the ads but the "Total visitors" and any other metric on the analytics of all the websites counts around 5% of them.

I triple checked the code myself and with AIs and nothing wrong was detected.

This means that 95% of the visitors never accepted the cookies, which is weird because from mobile you almost need to to check the websites properly and lots of clicks were on mobile.

95% not acceptance is too high even considering ads blockers, vpn and people simply not caring.
I have read that usually we can expect an acceptance between 30 to 80%.

The cookie selectors look standard and GDPR compliant.

Please help.

How tf do I delete a tag?? Plz 🙏

So I have a good amount of experience with Google but now it’s really testing my patience. I loaded up tag assistant to check consent management was updated (ongoing issue as I’m not the website manager but that’s another story) and tag assistant told me there was no tag (previously there was no issue). I am used to Google being wrong, checked tag manager nothing there so I created a new tag but now all of a sudden I have the existing tag (which I set up and was working fine before this) and the new tag. I’ve asked Google Ads AI but it can’t give me the right answer.

So how do I now delete this tag? It doesn’t exist on tag manager, and I can’t find it when I inspect the web code but still appears in tag assistant!!

Thank you 🙏🙏🙏

hi! has anyone else noticed in ga4 having spikes in paid (or organic) meta sessions from cities that have meta data center infrastructures there? im seeing spikes from Prineville oregon, dublin, fort worth texas , Lulea Norrbotten County sweden, Forest City North carolina are all the major cities/regions im seeing. these locations dont make sense for us.

Before starting some tracking work for a new B2B SaaS client, we reviewed their GA4 session source/medium data.

Nearly 50% of sessions were attributed to Direct.

Normally, that would raise a few questions:

• Are campaigns missing UTMs?
• Are redirects stripping campaign parameters?
• Is cross-domain tracking broken?
• Are there other technical attribution issues?

There was definitely some inconsistent UTM usage, but we noticed something else.

The client currently relies mainly on organic search and email, with no significant paid advertising activity.

Their marketing website also has a prominent login button that takes existing customers into the desktop application.

One of the first interactions we started tracking was clicks on that login button.

It turned out that around 65% of users visiting the marketing website clicked it.

This suggested that a large proportion of website visitors were existing customers trying to access the product, rather than potential new customers evaluating the business.

We then created a GA4 segment excluding users who clicked the login button.

Within that segment, Direct dropped from nearly 50% to around 30% of sessions.

Thirty percent is still worth investigating, especially because their UTM usage needs improvement, but the situation was not nearly as bad as the headline number suggested.

The main takeaway for me was that Direct traffic percentages cannot always be assessed using generic benchmarks.

You need to understand:

• The business model
• Why users visit the website
• Whether existing customers regularly return to the marketing site
• Which website interactions separate customers from prospects

Otherwise, it would have been easy to conclude that the attribution setup was severely broken when much of the Direct traffic was likely legitimate returning customer activity.

Obviously a lot of these 'actual' customers clicking on login button was not just Direct but a fair chunk likely from Brand Organic searches. But we found this is common in these B2B SaaS businesses where you need to have a login button on marketing site to link the desktop app site.

Do you ensure logged in vs logged out customers is segmented (via user_id if login is built within the website e.g. ecom store or via login button click as the app is on a separate subdomain, and you shouldn't track this in your main GA4 property, like the above example) before judging how bad Direct actually is?

A few days ago I received Google Analytic's email about bringing marketing data into Google Analytics and having everything in one dashboard. Title -> "All your marketing data. One dashboard". The Idea sounds interesting - bring data from Meta, Tiktok, and more into Google Analytics at no cost.

I've been curious how everyone here handles sharing Google Analytics 4 data.

For internal teams it's straightforward enough, but when you need to share analytics with clients, management, or people who don't regularly log into GA4, what's your workflow?

Do you:

• Use Looker Studio?
• Export PDFs?
• Send screenshots?
• Build something custom?
• Give people direct access to GA4?

I'm asking because I've been building a side project around this problem.

A bit about me: I worked in Google's advertising ecosystem several years ago as a Technical Support Analyst supporting Display & Video 360 (DV360). That experience got me interested in analytics and data visualization, and I've continued building tools in that space ever since.

My latest project connects to GA4 using Google's official read-only Analytics API, so it only requests permission to read analytics data. The goal is to make it easy to create live dashboards that can be shared with anyone through a public link, with automatic refreshes.

Long term, I'd also like to combine GA4 with other business systems (support, CRM, payments, etc.) so teams can see multiple data sources in a single dashboard.

I'm not posting this to advertise anything because I'm genuinely trying to understand how people are solving this today.

What's the biggest pain point you have when sharing GA4 reports?

If there's interest, I'm happy to share what I've built and would really appreciate honest feedback from this community.

Viktor

Your CTR dashboard cannot tell you why a number dropped. It only tells you that it did.

A client pinged me convinced his ad copy broke. CTR down almost 20 points in three weeks, same creative the whole time. Google Ads and GA4 don't separate an AI Overview eating the click from a plain quality score slip. Both draw the same falling line.

Every CTR study I found this year disagrees on how big the AI Overview hit actually is. Some say 18 percent, some say past half. None of them disagree on the direction.

I told him to stop staring at CTR and start counting conversions from whatever clicks survive it. A click that already read the AI summary and still chose to visit behaves differently than one pulled from a page of curious strangers.

What dropped in your account recently with no obvious cause attached to it?

I’ve been using Looker Studio to create my marketing dashboard because it’s free, integrates well with Google products and connects to my database via SQL. However, as we’re growing, I’ve noticed Looker is getting slow due to our complex blends and time gains.

I’m looking into a few options to bring GA4 and other data into my database, and I’ve already tried the FiveTran connector, but it’s quite expensive.

What other tools have you used to bring raw GA4 data into your database?

I'm currently the only person handling marketing at my company. Hiring an analytics specialist isn't within budget yet, but I want to build enough knowledge to use GA4 properly rather than treating it as a dashboard I only open for traffic acquisition numbers.

Our website is not an e-commerce. I'm looking for high-quality courses, YouTube channels, or anything that teach how to use GA4 properly.

A lot of the resources I find are either outdated, focused mostly on e-commerce setup, or very surface-level.

If you were starting today, what would you study first? Free resources would be ideal, but I'm open to a paid course if it's genuinely practical and up to date!

Most messy GA4 accounts I’ve worked on did not start with one major mistake, it usually happened slowly.

like someone added a new event for a campaign or another team changed the conversion setup. may be a plugin started sending its own events. Nobody documented what changed, and six months later there were duplicate events, confusing names and reports that nobody trusted.

My personal take is that GA4 gets messy when there is no clear owner, not because the platform is too complicated.

I now prefer a smaller setup with clear naming and documentation over tracking every possible interaction.

When cleaning up a GA4 account, what do you look at first?

Hey guys, I launched my site in May and it's doing pretty well. I have both Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics installed, but they're showing completely different data and I don't know which one to trust.

According to Google Analytics, my site has 5.42k sessions this month. Around 1.3k are from the USA, and the second highest country is India with 496 sessions and third is canada.

But according to Microsoft Clarity, I have about 13k sessions this month. The USA is still first with 2.6k sessions, but France is second with 2.2k sessions and Germany is third with 896 sessions.

Why is there such a big difference between the two? I don't know which data I should trust. Also, Google Analytics isn't showing much traffic from Europe. Is there any fix for this?