While it might come as a surprise to see that your traffic reporting directly from Grow can differ from GA4, it’s actually normal and expected.
Different analytics tools measure traffic in different ways, and with each tool you use, there are variables that can impact how traffic is counted. GA4, for example, is an estimate of traffic, and if you experienced the shift from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, you might remember a 6-10% difference in traffic, with some sites reporting higher while others reported lower.
If you have access to analytics at the server level, traffic often reports much higher than GA4.
Jetpack analytics (Wordpress) often also report much higher traffic activity than GA4.
Grow Analytics tracks reader sessions, pageviews and other actions to better understand their activity on a website and interaction with the product and your website.
In general Google Analytics is a representation of ‘holistic’ traffic to a publisher’s site, while Grow Analytics focuses on monetizable traffic. Because of this, you may notice lower pageview/session numbers in Grow.
If Grow Analytics and Google Analytics numbers are different, there are a few reasons why!
- Make sure that the Grow script is installed across your entire site. If the Grow script is missing from sections of your site (for example if you’ve removed / blocked Grow from certain pages or categories) this can skew the reporting. If the Grow script is not present, traffic is NOT tracking on those pages (if the Journey ads script is present you ARE generating revenue from traffic to those pages, but the traffic itself will not appear in your reporting). This can be especially impactful if GA4 is tracking traffic across your entire site, but Grow is not.
- Double check Web Story traffic. It is recommended that Web Story traffic is filtered into a separate analytics property. Grow does not run on Web Stories, and Journey ads do not serve on Web Stories. Web Story traffic should be separated out in GA4 so that any comparisons you are making between Grow analytics and GA4 analytics are a more “apples to apples” comparison. If Web Stories make up a large volume of your traffic, this can create a significant discrepancy.
- Check Countries of Origin. We are unable to gather analytics from US-sanctioned countries. If you have traffic sourced in US sanctioned countries, then it will not reflect in Grow analytics reporting (and will not monetize).
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Take a closer look into your Google Analytics dashboard for anything out of the ordinary.
- Ad blockers - Ad blockers often block both Mediavine and the underlying framework of events. We’ve taken steps to separate these events from traditional ad serving, ad blockers are increasingly strict in what data they allow.
- Timezones - If the user has a different timezone for their Google Analytics property from the timezone used for reporting at Mediavine (Eastern Timezone or America/New_York) then there will always be a variance when looking at daily numbers as different hours of activity would count towards different days.
- Note: We will alert you if your GA4 property isn't in the same timezone as your Journey Dashboard and earnings.
- Bot Lists - Both Google and Mediavine filter out bot traffic but use different lists and strategies to do so. Those lists often do not agree on the definition of bot traffic but Mediavine filters seem to more closely align with traffic that we can actually run ads on when compared to Google traffic.
- Timing - While Journey attempts to match the Google rules around what constitutes a pageview or session, there may be slight differences in terms of when Grow Analytics starts counting for duration, when the Grow Analytics script loads versus the Google Analytics script, etc.
It is very common for publishers to use multiple analytics tools, and we do recommend that you use at least one in addition to the Grow analytics reporting in your Journey Dashboard. This will give you a broader picture of your traffic and audience, and will give you metrics to compare to.
GA4 is a very popular analytics tool (and the most widely used with our publishers), but there are many others available and finding the right fit for your business is what matters most!