James Royal-Lawson

On multiple, unrelated websites, using GA4 I'm spotting some strange data.

On a single day (different for each site), for a few hours , of page views for / by around 70-80 "users", evenly split between Windows, Chrome OS, Linux and Mac, and from a set of 40ish countries.

None of these views have any custom dimensions or anything that I'd expect from a "real" visit (with GA4 loaded via GTM on the actual site).

Anyone got any guesses as to what's going on?

#ga4 #analytics

Aug 11, 2023 at 11:34amWeb
Show threadJames Royal-LawsonAug 22, 2023

Spotted this in yet another account. Soon it's going to be the case that I've seen it in every GA4 property I've checked. It's really strange.

I've realised quite a good way to spot it is to pull out views where the page title is (not set)

Another oddity is that in a couple of cases, hostname is a hostname historically related to the sites, but never been used with GA4, and no longer in use or redirected.

@SimoAhava do you have any ideas?

Show threadThomas Svensson 🖖Aug 11, 2023
@Beantin a testing system that checks from different OSs. Different countries for latency.
Show threadJames Royal-LawsonAug 11, 2023
@tsvenson as far as I can tell none of this data is generated by an actual visit to the websites. It's sent directly to GA4.
Show threadThomas Svensson 🖖Aug 11, 2023
@Beantin weird! Someone pulling your leg 🤔
Show threadJames Royal-LawsonAug 11, 2023
@tsvenson hats off to them if they are! 6 different websites, even different unrelated clients.
Show threadThomas Svensson 🖖Aug 11, 2023

@Beantin Knowing my brain, if I was you, it would slowly drive me nuts if I couldn't figure out what's going on.

Looking forward to updates about what you find out.

Show threadJames Royal-LawsonAug 11, 2023
@tsvenson oh it's totally bugging me. What's bugging me most is that I just can't think of WHY anyone would do this. If I could get my head around the motivation, I could *probably* let it go
Show threadThomas Svensson 🖖Aug 11, 2023
@Beantin I feel with you. I so know the path you can't avoid going down now. Hope you figure it out soon(ish).
Show threadcuan_knaggsAug 22, 2023
@Beantin we've recently began rolling out matomo to our properties and already i'm seeing more useful data. eg there have always been loads of 404s but UA and GA4 have never given any more i can use, now i'm seeing the actual request path with all params. might be a way to validate the data
Show threadJames Royal-LawsonAug 22, 2023

@mensrea Great that you're finding Matomo more useful! The key is to always know your data irrespective of which tool you use.

I've got clients with Matomo, PiwikPro, Plausible, GA4, SiteImprove - and one thing that's always true is that there always something odd somewhere. Every tool is a bit different, every site is built a bit different.

404s are actually a good example of how your data can really vary depending on implemetation and tool.

Show threadcuan_knaggsAug 22, 2023
@Beantin yup. our next step is to merge the frontend data with our server side monitoring, so we can more accurately map the oddness. we're more interested in performance and errors than user behaviour though
Show threadJames Royal-LawsonAug 22, 2023
@mensrea Oh, nice! As I'm generally working with website visitor behaviour, connecting back end data with front end data tends to be something out of reach in most cases.