The Most USEFUL Metrics & Dimensions in Google Analytics 4

[@johnnyway8667]

Why Advertising/All channels performance report has a discrepancy in comparison to Traffic/Acquisition reports? It would be great if you could create a video on Advertising and the new Google Ads reports.

[@clicksdontlie]

Hi Johnny, good idea! There are a few different reasons for it, here are the biggest (I think). Mostly it is that Google Ads have higher numbers than GA4. Here are top reasons for this: 1. People use ad blockers or browsers that block scripts, so they block your GA4 from firing. From my experience, this can be anywhere from 10%-25% of all your visitors. 2. Google Ads are clicked by bots (Google has protections, but they are not always perfect) 3. People click on ads, but don't accept your cookie policy (and GA4 script is not fired) 4. People click on ads, but never make it to your site (slow loading or they just closed the browser quickly.) 5. Your attribution model is set to first click attribution in GA4, more about this here: support.google.com/analytics/answer/10596866?hl=en I hope this helps!

[@clicksdontlie]

Oh yeah, what can you do about these? 1. You can use server side tracking - this will reduce ad blocker influence 2. Use software services that help you avoid bots 3. Not much you can do about this 4. Also this is hard to address, one thing to do is to make sure your ads are relevant 5. Look at the first click acquisition reports

[@johnnyway8667]

@@clicksdontlie Thanks! I'm aware that Google Ads and GA4 will always show different numbers as they are working in a different way. I was talking about the difference between Standard session report and Advertising report. In GA4, the revenue data is different for each report. For example, in Traffic Acquisition>Session report the revenue is 100k, but if I go to Advertising report and filter for the same Default channel grouping, the revenue is 90k. It seems like those Advertising reports are using different attribution models. Our default attribution is Data driven.