In This Lesson You Will Learn How To Find The Missing Traffic From The Source And Medium In Your Google Analytics Reports.
The aim of this lesson is to provide an explanation on how different reports in GA4 reports are based on events data, user data and first user data.
Why? You may have noticed that user numbers from different sources aren’t reported correctly in the GA4 interface, and the data isn’t recorded in GA4 reports even when you have added the correct UTM parameter to the landing page URLs. In this walk through we will find those missing users from different sources and mediums in the GA4 account.
Find Missing Source Medium In Google Analytics (GA4)
Step by Step:
How to create a custom exploration report to identify the true Session source/medium in GA4?
- Go to your Google Analytics 4 property
- Select the ‘Explore’ reports in GA4
- Select ‘Blank’ exploration report to start
- On the left-hand panel, under ‘Dimensions’, select the ‘+’ icon
- On the top search bar, type ’Session source/medium’ and select it to ‘Import’.
- Go to the left-hand panel again, and import ‘Event Count’ under metrics.
- Drag the ‘Session source/medium’ under Rows in the second menu from left
- Drag the ‘Event Count’ under Values in the second menu from the left.
- You may have to select ‘Show Rows’ as 500 to ensure the reporting window displays all rows for Session source/medium.
- You should be able to see all ’Session source/medium’, which are bringing events to your GA4 reporting.
Unlike the older Universal Analytics, GA4 puts less emphasis on session-based tracking and focuses more on event-based tracking. Events are at the core of GA4's measurement model, allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of user behavior beyond just the session boundaries.
Event tracking in GA4 involves measuring specific interactions or actions that users take on your website or app. An event is essentially a piece of data that represents a user action. These actions could include things like clicking a button, playing a video, submitting a form, downloading a file, or any other custom interaction that you want to track.
Hence the reason, there is variance in data for reports which are based on events or users in GA4.
If you are struggling to find traffic originating from your UTMs in the GA4 data, there is a chance the GA4 isn’t populating the reports correctly because of the limited number of events from the source. You should use the exploration report (as mentioned above) to create the custom report for the true session source/medium for the website traffic.
GA4 reporting is based on Events tracking I.e. page views, scrolls, clicks and any other custom events. Based on the events, GA4 then populates the data for the Users and Sessions. We often notice that reports based on Events have more data in comparison to the reports based on Users and Sessions.