GA4 Sessions and Pageviews vs. UA (And How to Adjust GA4 Session Timeout)

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In this video we're checking out GA4 session and pageview data for the Root and Branch property and comparing it to the UA data.
As you'll see, pageview data is almost identical in GA4 vs. UA. Session data on the other hand is much higher in GA4 as compared to UA. We'll investigate what we can learn from Google's documentation on the subject (support.google.com/analytics/...) and also my own theories for what is happening.
Finally, we'll review how we can adjust the session timeout period in GA4 (which I'm hoping will help to address the current session count "issue" we're seeing in the Root and Branch GA4 property).
Have questions or comments? Leave them in the comments. I'm always up for learning more...and for new video ideas.
There's typically a new video every week or two about GA4 or Google Tag Manager or Looker Studio or sometimes Google Ads or SEO. If you want to follow along with what I'm learning (trying to learn) you can subscribe at the link below:
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🔗 Links to 📖📖📖 BLOGS: These are the most popular blogs on the Root and Branch site from RU-vid visitors
✭ Do These 10 Steps to Install AND Configure GA4 Properly: www.rootandbranchgroup.com/ga...
✭ Events in GA4 and How it Compares to UA: www.rootandbranchgroup.com/ev...
✭ GA4 Reports Explained: Standard Reports, Explorations, Custom Reports: www.rootandbranchgroup.com/ga...
✭ Google Analytics 4 vs. Universal Analytics: www.rootandbranchgroup.com/go...
✭ A Practical Guide to Event Parameters: www.rootandbranchgroup.com/ga...
✭ GA4 Problems (And What You Can Do About Them): www.rootandbranchgroup.com/ga...
✭ Google Analytics 4 Link Click Tracking: www.rootandbranchgroup.com/go...
✭How to Install Google Tag Manager (GTM) on Wordpress: www.rootandbranchgroup.com/ho...
✭And Some SEO! How to Edit robots.txt on Wordpress!
www.rootandbranchgroup.com/ed...
🔗 Links to 📹📹📹 VIDEO TUTORIALS: These are most popular GA4 instructional videos as measured by views or watch time
📺 How to Set Up GA4 in 5 Minutes With GTM: • Set Up GA4 (in 5 Minut...
📺 How to Properly Configure Your GA4 Property: • 10 Steps to Configure ...
📺 6 Key Differences Between GA4 and UA: • Google Analytics 4 (GA... 🔑🔑🔑🔑🔑🔑
📺 The Truth About GA4 Event Parameters: • The Truth About GA4 Ev...
📺 GA4 Hits, Events, Sessions, and Users Explained: • Google Analytics Event...
📺 How to set up GA4 FORM SUBMISSION tracking with a thank you page: • How to Set Up a GA4 Fo... 🙏
📺 How to set up BUTTON CLICK tracking with GA4 and Google Tag Manager: • Set Up Page Timer Trac...
📺 How to set up PAGE TIMER tracking with GA4 and Google Tag Manager: • Set Up Page Timer Trac... ⏲
📺 How to Set Up LINK CLICK Tracking with GA4 and Google Tag Manager: • Button Click Tracking ... 🖯
📺 How to Set Up SCROLL DEPTH Tracking (25%, 50%, 75%, 90%) with GA4 and Google Tag Manager: • How to Set Up GA4 Link... 🖯
📺 How to Build a Link Click Tracking Report Using GA4 data and Looker Studio: • Google Data Studio GA4... 📊📊📊
📺 Campaign Tracking in GA4 to See UTM Tagged Traffic: • Campaign Tracking GA4 ...
📺 GA4 Conversion Tracking Compared to UA: • GA4 Conversion Trackin...
📺 Registering Custom Dimensions in GA4 Explained: • GA4 Custom Dimensions ... -
📺 How to Link GA4 and BigQuery: • Google Analytics 4 + B...
📺 Users in GA4 Explained vs. UA Users: • GA4 Users Explained: N...
📺 Creating and Using Audiences in GA4: • How to Create GA4 Audi...
📺 3 Practical Ways to Use the Path Exploration Report: • GA4 Path Exploration: ...
📺 How to Set Up Site Search in GA4 and UA: • Video
📺 Video review of the Source/ Medium report in GA4: • GA4 Reports: How to Re...
📺 All about the GA4 Certification: • Google Analytics 4 Cer... 🏆
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Опубликовано:

28 июн 2024

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Комментарии : 30

@catalinastingaciu3602 Год назад

I think it's related to the fact that in GA4 a session is also started when the user has just a user_engagement event. And if their session expired and they come back and scroll through that page a user_engagement will fire which will trigger a ga4 session but it won't trigger a session in UA since UA doesn't record user engagement.

@rooted-digital Год назад

Catalina, I think you could be right on the money. Thanks for adding your perspective. Pretty sure I just learned something new today. I appreciate it! Zack

@omersarikaya 21 день назад

That's exactly the reason. In UA all sessions have basically a pageview. But in GA4, when an idle browser tab is scrolled after 30 minutes of inactive time, this creates a new session without a pageview.

@funnellmarketing2076 Год назад

Love this video! Also so ridiculous Google is making us *DO EXPERIMENTS* to find out how its analytics tools work. Speaking of your experiment - what happened? :)

@rooted-digital Год назад

Well, thank you! And I agree....GA4 is quite the rollercoaster isn't it? In terms of your question, the session count in GA4 relative to pageviews now looks like it makes way more sense. Definitely made sense for a site like mine.

@Nyeeeesh 2 года назад

I think the difference in sessions and page views comes from the fact that Google sees it as a session with a page view, possibly followed hours later as a session with user engagement. In other words, Google might be adding hits to the sessions metrics when it shouldn't be and in more ways than one. What you said in the video is likely happening too. Could it also be possible that there are multiple tags or events that can occur for a session to start causing it to be miscounted as well?

@rooted-digital 2 года назад

Thanks for sharing your perspective, Cam. You certainly could be right. It definitely seems that GA4 is doing *something* to influence session count. I would not expect that tags / events are contributing to the miscount situation, but I've certainly been wrong before.

@faheemmahdi7659 Год назад

Very Good

@rooted-digital Год назад

Thanks for the feedback, Faheem. If you're interested, I just published a new video this morning that goes in depth on the 4 different user groups in GA4 (New Users, Total Users, Active Users, and Returning), and how they are calculated and where they show up. Here's the link just in case. : ) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-mvETBDVv1eM.html

@noobplayergame Год назад

how do you compare ?, does your website use 2 google analytics.

@rooted-digital Год назад

Hi Satrio, yes, my website is using both UA and GA4 right now. Are you also "dual tagging" like this? Here's a link to post I had published on LinkedIn that shows a more current comparison of my UA vs. GA4 data. More importantly, it has a link in it to a free tool that you can use to pull in your UA and GA4 data and compare side by side. www.linkedin.com/posts/zackduncan_ga4-googleanalytics-activity-6976232752660578304-jY6B?

@djmelushus Год назад

Hi, need some help here. So I’m in Acquisitions>Traffic Acquisition and when I add up all of the channel groups under ‘Session default channel group’, I get a total of 3,837 sessions, but under Sessions it says 3,800. Aren’t these numbers suppose to match like they did in UA? What am I doing wrong?

@rooted-digital Год назад

That’s really interesting. And yes, I’m with you and would have expected the data to match. I wish I had a good answer for you, but it’s a mystery to me as well. I’ll keep you posted if I come across anything that could explain it. I’m curious, if you run this in Explorations what session count do you get for the same time period?

@djmelushus Год назад

@@rooted-digital Thank you for responding. Unfortunately, It shows the same results in Exploration. I’m so perplexed, because it’s not happening on other accounts I manage. For this account, I need to report back and show this breakdown with session numbers (Organic, Direct, etc.) but if the numbers aren’t adding up, I’m not sure what to do.

@rooted-digital Год назад

@@djmelushus That is confusing and frustrating. I'm sorry. I don't know if this is related, but it might be worth looking at your data and privacy settings for this account relative to the others. I haven't seen this myself, but I read somewhere that if Google Signals is activated it can sometimes do some wonky things to data. For example, small amounts of data in a given traffic channel (or source / medium or campaign) might be hidden / obscured due to privacy compliance stuff if Signals is active. Not sure if it applies but might be worth looking into a bit. Wish I could be more useful. Best of luck to you.

@_shivaji Год назад

Informative!! I came here by looking for something else. How do we export date wise sessions data in GA4? Don't find any such report. & When I search Sessions vs count of session_start, I get slightly different numbers with 5-6% variation. Sessions number from insight is 114K & count of session_start is 107K

@rooted-digital Год назад

Hello! I just checked in my own data and I see a 3% variation between session count vs. session_start events. I think this Google support article may have some relevant info: support.google.com/analytics/answer/9191807?hl=en Pasting relevant section below. "Sometimes the session ID is not associated with the session_start event (e.g., when the event is filtered out from a subproperty). In these cases, Analytics still generates a session ID. How the number of sessions is calculated Analytics calculates the number of sessions that occur on your site or app by estimating the number of unique session IDs." In terms of exporting your sessions, I haven't done this. I think this could be a place where the BigQuery integration could help if you decide you want to dig in to the details. Best of luck!

@_shivaji Год назад

@@rooted-digital Thank you for response. Its helpful. I think I will have to study more to understand these nuances you pointed.

@evanjoyal9540 Год назад

Do you know if you can grab page views from GA4?

@rooted-digital Год назад

Hi Evan. Do you mean can we view page views in GA4? If so, the answer is yes. Go into your standard reports and then click into the "Engagement" reports. You'll see a report for "Pages and Screens" and you can look at your top pages here. Is this what you meant?

@hitbhalodia1518 Год назад

Hello, I wanted to know that if we get a huge difference between the UA ( page views ) and GA4 ( page views ), What can be the reason for that ? I almost searched the support of google regading that, but not able to identify the exact reason. Can anyone help me with that if faced. Thanks.

@rooted-digital Год назад

Hello there. How huge is the difference? Are we talking a difference of 10%? 100%? And is GA4 or UA the place where you are seeing the higher page view counts? One huge difference between GA4 and UA is how the data model works. In UA, there was a specific Page View hit type. In GA4, a pageview is an event. So the data is definitely going to be different simply because it is recorded differently. But the degree of the difference might help us narrow down the possible explanations more.

@hitbhalodia1518 Год назад

@@rooted-digital Thanks for the reply, UA is the place where page view counts are more. The difference is around 25% we can say for a particular date range of suppose 6 day window while seeing the analytics. Also UA is powered by analytics.js and GA4 is using the GTM. Thanks.

@Terranort9406 Год назад

I'm having the same problem, were you able to fix it?

@DaimonosUlv Год назад

My issue is totally the opposite, sessions on GA UA is way higher than on GA4 - Can anyone explain how to find the exact equivalent for sessions on GA UA in GA4?

@rooted-digital Год назад

Hi there, I found this support article from Google that might help: support.google.com/analytics/answer/9964640?hl=en#sessions&zippy=%2Cin-this-article Here's a snippet below from the part on Session Counting: Session counting "Some aspects of session counting in Google Analytics 4 differ from Universal Analytics. In Universal Analytics, a new campaign will start a new session regardless of activity. In Google Analytics 4, a new campaign does not begin a new session. This may lead to lower session counts in your Google Analytics 4 property." This is one reason that it's possible to have higher session counts in UA compared to GA4. If you care to share some more specifics about how different the session counts are (for example is "way higher" like 20% higher in UA vs. GA4 or like 100% higher?), it might. For example, if it's something like the latter situation, I'd check first at your GA4 tag implementation setting and would re-confirm your session duration settings. Best of luck! Zack

@awakenthegreatnesswithin 11 месяцев назад

Did you find a fix?

@livestudentcode2248 8 месяцев назад

Dear Admin, I am working on a React Single Page Application. Due to some business needs, I want to use my CUSTOM_PAGE_VIEW rather than using the Default PAGE_VIEW in the GTM SIDE. So I disabled sending the default SEND_PAGE_VIEW as FALSE from GTM. May I know, Will CUSTOM_PAGE_VIEW affects any other valuable reports belonging to default PAGE_VIEW like Page Views, Screens, Session Views, Average User Engagement Time, etc...? What are the things I have to be aware of when disabling the default SEND_PAGE_VIEW as FALSE from GTM? Thanks in advance

@rooted-digital 8 месяцев назад

Hello there. I don't have enough direct experience with single page applications to answer your question with confidence. I did, however, find this resource from Google that deals specifically with your situation. I hope it's helpful and I wish you the best: developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ga4/views?client_type=gtag

@livestudentcode2248 8 месяцев назад

@@rooted-digital Thanks for the informative response