Big discrepancy between Journey sessions and GA ones
Answered
Why are my Journey sessions so much lower than my GA and Clicky sessions? There's more than a 200 difference between the two.
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Official comment
Hey all! Thank you so much for surfacing this - it helped us to uncover a discrepancy in traffic reporting that we are currently working to resolve. There are typically discrepancies amongst the different analytics tools (for example, there are usually differences between Jetpack analytics and Google Analytics). As a reminder, Google has stated that GA4 is only providing an estimate of traffic (Reference). In this case, however, we uncovered that traffic from GDPR countries were not pulling through to your Journey Dashboard reporting causing a discrepancy in our reporting.
Please note that ads are still serving on EU traffic, so Earnings are not impacted. Only traffic reporting is impacted currently, and we are working on a fix.
One thing to note: RPM is calculated by dividing Earnings by Traffic (Earnings / Traffic * 1000 = RPM) so once the traffic discrepancy is fixed, RPM will likely look lower. EARNINGS are not lower – the money you’ve earned from ads is still accurate. But once Earnings are being divided by the correct amount of total traffic, that will lower RPM.
We appreciate you all bringing this to our attention and will update you once this fix is rolled out!
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Hey Hollie! Journey analytics are just different, similar to many other third-party analytics trackers, a bit of variance is expected. It's important to note that GA4 is just an estimate, not the exact measurement or the absolute truth.
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Are they different to Mediavine? My Mediavine site analytics always matches GA4.
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Mediavine pulls in right from your GA4 because of that required connection, so those numbers will always match!
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Yesterday, Journey reported that I had 290 sessions when I had around 720. Something must be wrong…
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I'm having a similar problem - with Journey showing only 50% (or fewer!) sessions than what I see in GA. I have asked my IT for help and he can't figure it out either. It's been 13 days of underreporting. Is there a troubleshooting resource available for this issue? Thank you.
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Yesterday and today, I had almost a 600 difference. Often, it's a 40 % cut from the number in Google Analytics. Is this an expected range?
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I am also concerned about this, and am noticing the issue in both my Journey sites, so I'm relieved to see Karla's comment that it's on developers' radars and a fix is coming, and that it won't impact earnings – though I'm curious to see how it impacts RPM. Thanks for your responsiveness, Journey team!
My analysis is slightly different than Karla's. You know how G4 Google Analytics has delayed reporting? (Ex: You may have 1,000 sessions in the day, but at 8am EST, G4 only shows 600 until about 2pm EST?) From my observations over the past few weeks, despite starting off by pulling sessions correctly, it seems Journey is now pulling the earlier (much lower) number of sessions every day. Curious to see how this pans out, and thanks!
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Lillie Marshall You don't need to wait for the fix to see how it impacts RPM. You could calculate your real RPM right now by taking the GA4 sessions and use the formula (Revenue/GA4 Sessions) X 1000 for a given timeframe. Hope this helps!
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I am having a similar problem, my sessions and pageviews are about 10 % of what my GA4 shows!
If i try to calculate via (Revenue/GA4 Sessions) X 1000, then my RPM are dismally low.
Just hope this improves in the coming days.
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I am also noticing a quite high discrepancy. In one of the sites, Journey analytics marks half of the sessions I see on G4. Is this going to be fixed or is it how it's always going to be? Thanks!
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Was this fixed? I am still seeing a difference between ga4 and journey.
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The GDPR issue, has been fixed! We are looking into other potential discrepancies or if it's our expected difference.
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Awesome – thanks so much!
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Thanks but I'm not seeing any difference yet. There have been a few days when my traffic is accurate, but mostly it's still very off. On a separate note, I'm loving the breakdown of pages! It's so helpful
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I reported the same problem a few days ago, my site averages 6000 to 7000 sessions per day (G4 - weekdays) and Journey only counted about 1200/1500 on average over the last days (since friday).
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I'm also experiencing a discrepancy between sessions on journey and GA4
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Why are my Grow sessions so much lower than my Google Analytics? like 30% less or more some days. This is frustrating! With this big of discrepancy, I'm going to fall below the 10K sessions likely for a while, and that worries me because I ended my other ad network early and didn't think that the reporting would be this different.
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When it comes to analytics discrepancies, this is something that we've been watching for awhile now with different sites and it comes down to that fact that no two third party analytics tools are going to be exactly the same. Things like, time of day they are being tracked, bots that might be filtered out by Grow, vs GA, etc.
We are still working on a help article to explain this more in depth with Journey so stay tuned for that. I'll be sure to link here when we have it!-2 -
With my website the difference is even bigger. Pageviews and Sessions shown by Grow are 3 times less than the ones on Google Analytics.
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My Sessions on Journey are also 50% less that what G4 showing. I understand that no two tools will be exact but this a huge difference. Would you pls check this.
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Hi There,
There is a huge difference between my sessions in G4 and journey. Journey dashboard is showing 60% less. Could you pls check and help me.
Thanks.
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Hi there, just noting here that my sessions on Journey are about 70% of what is shown in my GA4 sessions. Is it just a matter of waiting for a fix, or are there key things I can check to ensure everything is good my end please? Many thanks :)
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Mine sessions are also 3 times less, sessions are 5000 lower on journey compared to Google analytics
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Hi. Is there any update on this issue? I am also experiencing the same issue as others on this thread with big discrepancies in my GA4 sessions compared to grow. The stats in Grow are more comparable to those I see in GSC, indicating that my other traffic is not being picked up. Could this happen?
Thanks
Michelle
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Hi there, I would also like to know if there is any update, my Grow traffic is still about half of my G4 sessions and this is actually impacting my revenue.
Thanks,
Angela0 -
Hello Support ,
Thank you for your reply and for the information provided about the discrepancies in the analysis tools. However, we are experiencing significant problems with Mediavine's session counting, as shown in the attached graph. The percentage of traffic correctly counted fluctuates considerably, which may impacts our Session RPM.
I understand that each analysis tool can have differences, but it's hard to accept that these differences are so marked without questioning Mediavine's counting methodology. Google Analytics is a benchmark in web data analysis and is widely used to track users behavior, etc.
It would be implausible for Google, the technology giant, to display erroneous information on Google Analytics, especially as they use the same methodology to build their Google AdSense analytics (rpms, earnings, impressions, conversions etc).
We would therefore ask you to examine the reasons for these discrepancies in more detail and to provide us with a clear explanation. We rely on Mediavine for accurate and reliable data in order to maximise our advertising revenues.Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your feedback and for a fix.
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Does this mean that Grow has only been able to track traffic from GDPR countries for the past month?
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My GA4 traffic is about double my Journey sessions. This means my RPMs are even lower which is almost more concerning than the sessions in Journey being incorrect. With mostly US traffic, I expected much higher RPMs after a few weeks (even with the start of the month).
Any ETA for a fix for this?
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Atte Tanner no, for the first few weeks we were NOT tracking GDPR countries but that was fixed pretty early on.
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