r/GoogleAnalytics

Hi there.

As I said in the tittle, I'm looking for a way to use specific audiences tha I recolected in my website and GA4 to my Meta ads campaign. The last month I recolected cualificated traffic for a speciffic medium and I classified it via UTM.

I can use it in Google Ads, but I didn't find the way to use it in Meta. Btw, I can't download the data bases because is a confidentian data of my client and I'm just the advertiser.

Is that possible? Or what kind of alternatives can I do for this purpose?

I am analyzing my User Acquisition report in GA4 and finding that (direct) / (none) is the top-ranked source/medium for new users. A significant portion of these sessions land directly on my homepage.

Since User Acquisition focuses on the very first time a user interacts with the site, it is confusing why a "direct" source is so dominant. My paid ads, referrals, and organic traffic are all being tracked correctly in their respective channels.

Has anyone else encountered this high volume of direct traffic specifically for new users? I am trying to determine if this points to a tracking configuration issue, privacy-related data stripping, or another underlying cause.

1. Open GA4 → Reports

2. Go to Library → Create Detailed Report → Traffic Acquisition

3. Add Filter → Session Source → Match Regex

4. Paste this regex:

chatgpt.com|perplexity.ai|gemini.google.com|grok.com|copilot.microsoft.com|claude.ai

5. Save the changes to the current report and name it “AI Traffic”

6. Edit the Life Cycle collection → Add the “AI Traffic” report → Click Publish

Now you’ll see an AI Traffic dashboard under Acquisition in the Life Cycle section.

Hey

Running DV360 campaigns across multiple formats (Display, Demand Gen, etc.) and landing pages, and I'm seeing a massive discrepancy between DV360-reported clicks and GA4 sessions — consistently 90–95%+ fewer sessions than clicks.

Context on the mix:

• ~95% of DV360 clicks come from Demand Gen
• The gap exists across all formats and all landing pages — not isolated to one placement or creative
• Other channels (Paid Search, Meta, etc.) show normal click-to-session ratios in GA4
• The problem has been there since the beginning — not a recent regression
• Traffic is predominantly mobile
• There are no redirects between the ad click and the landing page — the final URL is called directly
• DV360 ↔ GA4 linking is configured

Has anyone dealt with a discrepancy this large specifically with DV360 + mobile? What's your debugging framework for this?

Happy to share more details if needed.

I’d like to discuss the following with you. I’ve recently started working at a company that sets up Google Ads campaigns for its various projects and ventures.

- My company, Alpha, is an industrial firm that manufactures monitors, and Alpha has several websites

- Alpha also owns a go-kart track (an entertainment centre offering the option to host special events and corporate gatherings; with a separate restaurant)

- Alpha also manufactures swimming pools, which it sells under a separate brand

When I joined the company, I found quite a mess, whether in Google Ads (e.g. double-counted conversions) or a major mess in GA4 and GTM. Let’s focus on GA4.

In GA4, I have 3 active Analytics accounts:

- Alpha Company Pools Account #1 -> Alpha Pools (services and apps)

- Alpha Company Account #2 -> all of this company’s websites (around 5) + go-kart track

- Alpha Company Shop Account #3 -> Alpha Company Shop

Google tag structure:

GA4 tag:

‘Go-karting - GA4’

Destinations:

‘Go-karting’ (Alpha Company Account #2)

‘Service #1’ (Alpha Company Account #2)

‘Service #2’ (Alpha Company Account #2)

‘Alpha Company Shop’ (Alpha Company Shop Account #3)

‘Alpha Company Shop’ (Alpha Company Account #2)

‘Service #3’ (Alpha Company Account #2)

‘Service #4’ (Alpha Company Account #2)

Several of the above-mentioned Destination IDs are linked to the pages. Each of these IDs collects data. For example:

go-karting page -> ID from all destinations (including the ‘Alpha Company Shop’ destination)

Alpha Company shop page -> ID from all landing pages (including the ‘Go-karting’ landing page)

and several other pages related to the sale of Alpha Company monitors have the same IDs.

I have a question:

Does this in any way affect the research and building of the target audience for a Google Ads campaign? If I run a campaign for the Premium Monitor product, will data on customers who visited the Go-karting or Swimming Pools pages be sent to this campaign? Where these are completely different target audiences? The performance of some campaigns is unusually low, hence my query.

This morning I finished wiring Google Ads conversion tracking — trial_start firing server-side, bidding optimized for trials, the whole thing.

Then a new user signed up. And I couldn't tell you where they came from.

Not because GA4 didn't know. It did. But because our users table has no UTM columns.

GA4 can tell me "google / cpc." My database can't. So I can't:
- Calculate LTV by acquisition channel
- Know whether Google Ads or X Ads drove a signup
- Filter subscribers by source when making budget decisions

Step 1 (GTM): one place to manage all tracking pixels, no code deploys to add tags.

Step 2 (UTM): store utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, gclid on the user record at signup. Capture from the URL on landing, pass it at magic link time, persist once, never overwrite.

If you're running any paid traffic without UTM columns on your users table, you're flying blind. Fix it before you spend another dollar.

How are you keeping track of ads -> utm -> subscription sources? Is there a better way than I described?

Google just pushed a massive update to GA4 that automatically categorizes traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude into a new AI Assistant channel.

For the last two years, we’ve been guessing how much traffic we were losing to LLMs. Now that the data is finally native in our dashboards, the "zero-click" reality is hitting hard.

how you guys are thinking about that?

Recently my PPC landing pages have been showing up in my GA reports for organic search and I'm not sure why.

All the landing pages have noindex tags on them and when I inspect the URLs in search console it says none of them are indexed.

Does anyone have any tips for troubleshooting?

Hey everyone,

We’re seeing a very strange issue in GA4 for a large news publisher website (flash.gr) starting May 16th.

Symptoms:

• Huge drop in Views/Pageviews only from May 16 onward
• Active Users remain relatively stable
• In the reports, articles have more Active Users than Views
• Chartbeat shows no traffic/pageview drop at all
• No code deployment or tracking changes happened on May 16
• Another publisher site we manage with a very similar setup does not show the issue

Has anyone seen something similar recently?

What would you check first?

Thanks!

Small realization while helping a friend with a subscription-based business They were focused on getting more customers, but when we looked closer, some revenue was just slipping through from failed payments, expired cards, and incomplete checkouts.

Not people choosing to leave just payments that never got recovered.

We made a few simple changes:

• retried failed payments at better times
• sent better follow-ups instead of one generic reminder

It actually made a bigger difference than expected. Made me curious how many small businesses focus heavily on acquisition while missing revenue that’s already within reach.

Anyone here actively track payment recovery, or is this something that usually gets ignored?

Starting a new ecomm job next week as a data analyst.

The role gives recommendations to other marketing functions, primarily using GA4 and GTM.

I have some experience with the platform, but not too much in relation to eComm.

I start in just under two weeks.

What are some key things I should know beforehand?

I can build reports, funnels, and explorations in GA4, but sometimes it still feels harder to quickly identify what’s actually driving business impact without heavily customizing everything.

Curious whether others genuinely find GA4 better for strategic decision-making or just more flexible technically.

Hey everyone,
I’m seeing a massive discrepancy between what Pinterest reports and what actually lands in my Google Analytics (GA4), and I want to see if anyone else is dealing with this recently.
Pinterest is showing a solid number of outbound clicks, but when I check GA4, I’m only seeing about 15% to 20% of that traffic actually show up as sessions. I know there's always going to be some drop-off between social clicks and GA4, but an 80%+ loss seems completely extreme.
For context on my setup: I do not use UTM parameters on my Pinterest links right now.
I'm trying to figure out if this is:

1. GA4 misattributing the traffic to "Direct" or "Unassigned" because I'm not using UTMs.
2. People bouncing before the site and GA4 script fully load in the Pinterest in-app browser.
3. Cookie consent banners blocking the GA4 tracking.
4. Just a widespread Pinterest reporting glitch happening right now.
   Has anyone else experienced this specific issue lately? If you have, did you find a way to fix it or get more accurate tracking?
   Thanks!

Hi all,
We attach a UTM to our location pages - and I recently noticed the entire string showing up as the "source" (and the medium appears as "not set").

Any ideas as to what could be causing this, or how to debug? Thanks!

Have you found it cheaper to have some dedicated in house or to pay for a consultant ?

& roughly how much do you pay ?

& has it paid off ?

I need a way to track about 20 blogs traffic over the next few months.

Regex doesn’t work because with 20 different url it becomes too long - tried in explore.

They are part of a blog, but there also 500 other blogs which all start with /blog so I can’t filter by path.

So… how do I do it? Is there a way 😭

Also I am tracking a segment that’s set to ai as the referee traffic.