James Royal-LawsonAug 11, 2023

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

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_knaggs
@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
Aug 22, 2023 at 10:32amWeb
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.