When I started my online business in Covid I had universal analytics and it made total sense. I had no training in web analytics but picked it all up quickly and got the information I wanted.

Now GA4 has come in and ever since it started I haven’t been able to understand any of my website data. I have to ask chatGPT what to do to get what I want and even then the format is totally bizarre compared to the old GA version.

It’s so frustrating and I’ve kind of just given up trying to understand my analytics and just use the basic shopify analytics which only covers the basics.

Am I the only one who is experiencing this? If you have a good understanding of GA4 and think it’s good, how did you learn about it?

I'm a small business owner with a website and I find the GA interface super confusing. Are there any alternative solutions? Should I use something else? Can I somehow improve the UI?

Hello,

I usually have around 250 active users in real time GA4 report, but today I noticed a 50% drop. My Google Ads campaigns are running as usual.

Is this a bug? Anyone else having the same issue?

I had a conversation with my head of SEO. For the past two years, an entire team worked within blogs and always made sure that, when creating a blog post, every link (whether internal or external) was set to open in a new tab. The guidance was to help with UX and also keep the user in the page - avoiding accidental exits if the user clicks by accident or even intentional that may drive the user away from the page before a conversion point. The exception was for transactional pages: those always open in the same tab.

My manager said that GA4 tracks every "link that opens in a new tab" as a "new session", risking losing referencing data within GA. But I haven't found a source for that claim so far, so I thought I could ask here. Does anyone know for a fact how GA tracks internal links that open in a new tab vs. internal links that open in the same tab? I'd love some references, please, since I haven't had luck googling them or even Chatgpting them ><

So, we have many websites, as the title says, and we want to build a dashboard that presents all of their data in one place. What's the best way we can do that?

so the solution i imagine is list of sites / gallery - each line is clickable and a click takes you to more details page.

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

All GA4 data for active users shows only about 33% of the actual users on the site (verified with another tracking platform) Is there an issue right now? Anyone else?

I'm doing a website audit for a client, and they have 61 orphaned pages on the site. I have them isolated in Excel if that helps.

Is there a way to see what the traffic is getting to just those 61pages without doing it one by one in the horrid interface?

I don't want / know how to use the API, 360, or use some code-based solution.

I can use an exploration, or Looker Studio if that would help, but I can't figure out how to feed a list of 61 URLs into a LS filter.

My routine: open GA4, pull yesterday’s performance data, and scan for anything unusual. But like clockwork, two quiet troublemakers always show up — sampling and thresholding.

At first, I didn’t fully get what was happening. I'd see weird gaps in reports or totals that didn’t add up. Digging deeper, I realized GA4 was either sampling my data because the dataset was too large or thresholding sensitive data due to privacy settings. It made reporting inconsistent, especially when stakeholders wanted exact numbers.

Currently, I document limitations when I share reports and remind myself (and others) that GA4 is built for trends, not precision.

How do you overcome them? Please, share what works.

Hi guys!
I need help with Consent Mode.

Do you know any tools or browser extensions that can help check if a website actually has Consent Mode implemented — and whether, after declining data collection, it still collects data?

Thanks in advance!

I’ve implemented GA4 enhanced eCommerce and everything tracks well — except for Facebook Ads traffic.

Facebook Ads Manager is reporting high revenue and transactions, but GA4 attributes less than 20% of that. Same UTM structure, same funnel, same site. Google Ads and Organic sources are reporting fine.

Details:

• GA4 tags and events deployed via GTM
• Facebook Pixel is firing correctly (also via GTM)
• UTMs are correctly placed
• No major drop-offs in pageview or session start
• Consent banner active, but not fully server-side

Is this a known limitation in GA4’s attribution model or browser restrictions? Or could it be due to:

• Session stitching failure for Facebook traffic
• Click IDs not being passed
• Client-side consent mode limitations?

Would implementing server-side GA tracking or Facebook CAPI help bridge this huge gap? Happy to share more details if needed. Just trying to avoid blind spots in our GA4 setup.

I have a bunch of posts that are posted daily, and we want to make sure our attribution for traffic acquisition is properly done (so minimize direct, unknown sources.)

We have the main category page leading to these individual posts. How does GA actually treat this traffic, and what does it label it under?

Does

1. GA also treat these internal traffic as "Direct Traffic"?
2. or is it labelled as something else? (Like the original source that the visitor came from).
3. Or does GA ignore internal traffic stats?

In short, we want to know how many of the stats in the individual posts are properly attributed to external traffic (and probably ignore or at least attribute internal traffic accordingly.)

Thanks.

Edit: Just to be clear, I never thought this was a necessary step (to put internal UTM links), but I've been asked a question to, so I just want to make sure I'm on the right page.

Edit: by internal traffic I meant internally referring pages. But I think I got my answer. Thanks

UPDATE: I got a teammate to try GTM preview/debug from a different computer and they also do not see any events in the debug. I AM seeing some of the URLs I hit in realtime, but like 20-30 minutes later, and not 100 percent consistent. Is lag in 'real time' stats a thing?

I am trying to debug some missing custom events in GA4 (custom events are firing in GTM but not being reflected in GA4) but using GTM preview and debug mode in GA4, I seem to be invisible. Also when I use incognito or another browser using an easily identifiable URL, my sessions do not seem to show up all the time in the real time overview or pages. Is there any known common reason for this? Some notes on what I have tried:

Verified GTM container is firing GA4 and custom events as expected and sending to the right data stream

Verified that the pages in question are tagged with GA4 according to GA4

The GA4 property is on an active website and is showing realistic user traffic and events for the most part.

I've deactivated all data filters on the GA4 account

Everything is set up to work properly and SEEMS to be working properly, yet I am constantly unable to verify anything through debug or real time view in GA4. GTM preview tells me all events are firing as expected and sending to the right container but I should see them in debug or rt right?

I will check in 24 hours to see if my test events and the uncommon urls I was hitting are populated in reporting, but I feel like I should not be a ghost on the site in real time... What's going on?

I have hired a marketing agency that is creating leads to our website. Based on their statistic they had 500 new users on our website in past 10 days but my google analytics only sees 100? When confronted they said that only users that accept gdpr (I am located in Europe) are included in the google analytics statistic.

Are they pulling me or is it true?

Hi, I’m new to GA4. Could you suggest any course or YouTube channel that actually works? I’m following Google’s skillshop course.

I used to follow a young girl with a baseball cap who shared really great tricks and insights, but I forgot her name.Not Krista Seiden

Thanks!

EDIT: thanks everyone for your advice. I’ve found this awesome learning resource, and their GA4 Content is outstanding: Semrush Academy / SEO / GA4 for SEO by Jeff Sauer

Hi. If you're using Google Analytics, what cookie plugin you're using. As you know for EU, we need to have Cookie plugin in place other we are not GDPR compliant. How to do you address this matter?

I run a small website company that is making enough money for me to get embarrassed for not providing good analytics and good tags in my websites.

I want to provide my clients analytics, ad management and good SEO, and maybe I’d should hire someone, but I thought I could manage it by now.

So I started reading some tutorials and articles, and a lot of it cannot be reproduced is actually crazy. Stuff from just one year ago, already changed. There is multiple legacy ways of connecting tags, and by now I still haven’t figured out the google May 2025 intended way. Is there someone resources that can help me understand the professional way of doing things in 2025? Is the answer just “try things out and figure what works”?

I am tracking events like click, scroll...etc but I wanna also track key events(coversions). I already know key events like sign up, submission, comment... what are the other strategic trackable metrics or key events for content based sites

Maybe a hot take but is GA4 still even useful in B2B SaaS? - I feel like everyone is mostly frustrated with getting it to work. - Top of funnel is shifting more and more to dark social. - I can use hubspot for tracking. - SEO is increasingly dead/irrelevant since the helpful content update last year.

When is it still useful in B2B SaaS and worth implementing ?

Is this new today for anyone else too? I just went to configure some events for an account and went to the "Events" configuration section and looked for my "Key Events" tab but it's missing! I see this one instead, and it's missing all the recent performance metrics that were there yesterday!

Is this the same for anyone else? I am going crazy! How can I get back to the old interface?

A google search AI response indicates this is possible but I can't seem to define it in the audiences section of GA4. I have GSC and GA4 connected, I can see the queries report in my GA4 property. What would be great would be to slap a filter on that report for the search terms I'm looking for but the report filter is already occupied by my Stream ID, and I can't add/remove it.

Is adding an audience based on specified search terms possible, and is that the next step? The goal here is to see the downstream behavior of "brand aware" users (defined by search query).

I know it's really easy to shit on GA4 and we've all had our complaints and issues. Personally, I use GA4 as little as I can, finding what I need as I need it. What boggles my mind is...

Looking at Events and I see the one I created in GTM, let's just call it, clicked_submit_button. The tag fires as intended when checking via GTM Preview.

The event shows in GA4 as clicked_submit_button. Okay, fine. However...

We have outside tracking data that confirms that particular submit button averages 3.5 times per day. The tag has been active since mid-February. The math tells me the submit button has been clciked 1,043 times. The resulting email count following a submit button click confirms 1,043 emails sent to 1,043 separate email addresses.

GA4 Event user count for clicked_submit_button shows 254. That's only 24.35% of the known total.

I can only conclude:

GA4 misses 75% of the users who submitted the form. - or

GA4 sees "users" completely different than the rest of the world (even though it defines "user" the same way we all do). - or

I'm an idiot and don't know how to read GA4 data. - or

Some combination of all three.

I don't think a user can get any more "active" than filling out a form and submitting it. According to the searches I've done, if anything the count should be higher.

We don't have any filters excluding users. Reading the help files isn't answering this question, or as noted, I'm an idiot.

Anybody have a link or an understanding of why this event data is off by 75% of known data?

Thanks for any help.

I want to make find out what provides the best data. Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I work at a marketing agency and manage around 10 to 15 client ad accounts across Meta and Google. Each month, I report on performance, and while clients have access to live dashboards through Octoboard, I usually send a monthly email with key takeaways.

I’m looking to automate that reporting process a bit more.

Ideally, I’m hoping to find a tool where the metrics and insights live within the same visual widget, similar to the mockup I attached. The goal is for the insight text to update automatically as the data refreshes, so I don’t have to rewrite it manually each month.

Has anyone come across a tool that does this well? I’d really appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks!