I was working on a Google Ads account where I set up separate purchase conversion actions for client-side tracking, server-side tracking, and offline conversion tracking.

I compared the reported results over the same three days: 26 to 28 August 2026. Here are the numbers I recorded:

→ Server-side tracking: 160.76 conversions
→ Offline conversion imports: 153.00 conversions
→ Server-side + offline: 223.36 conversions

The combined conversion action reported 38.9% more conversions than server-side tracking alone. The interesting part was deduplication.

Adding the two individual figures gives 313.76 conversions, but the combined action reported 223.36 after accounting for overlapping purchases using transaction IDs.

So the two sources were not contributing entirely unique conversions. This is why I don't think comparing conversion counts alone is enough to evaluate a tracking setup.

I'd want to validate the results against actual backend orders, check transaction IDs, compare conversion values, and confirm that the conversion actions are configured appropriately.

One thing I'm still interested in discussing is how others approach this comparison.

When comparing client-side, server-side, and offline purchase tracking in Google Ads, how do you validate which conversions are genuinely additional versus already captured by another source?

I documented the account comparison in CMnT for anyone interested in the setup

Hi

I have a new website that uses Stripe Checkout Session for the payments. In case you aren't familiar with the flow: the user places an order on our website, gets redirected to Stripe's secure payment page, makes the payment and then gets redirected back to the success page on our website.

Under "Traffic Acquisition", this is what I see:

1. (direct) / (none)
2. l.instagram.com / referral
3. tagassistant.google.com / referral
4. google / organic
5. chatgpt.com / ai-assistant
6. checkout.stripe.com / referral
7. instagram.com / referral
8. ig / social
9. (not set)
10. m.facebook.com / referral

Should I somehow exclude checkout.stripe.com / referral?

What do you recommend? Thanks

Hi,

My Amazon affiliate links confirm that there are visits, but GA since yesterday has been showing 0 for all properties, anyone experiencing the same?

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to set up GA MCP with Claude however I can't install homebrew because I have an Intel-based Macbook and it's no longer supported. Are there any alternatives to homebrew out there that I can use?

I'm using Macbook pro 2019 MacOs Sequoia

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone, me and my client cant reach daily reports snapshot for 20 hours, it says there is no data. everthing seems zero.

when the real-time data (last 30 mins) is flowing without problems. i can see that there is traffic, actions and conversions.

I have checked filters, gtm and pixels and everything seems okay. can you help?

Hi all. I'm trying to add a couple of filters to some of my reports in GA4, but I keep getting a "this report cannot be saved" message. It's happening on multiple properties as well. Any ideas what could be causing this?

I recently launched an app last April, and it’s going well, but there’s an issue with the mau and total users. The thing is that my Mau is saying 7k while the total users are 280. Can someone explain what is happening?

The goal is to have GA data into BigQuery. Using Data Studio to visualise from data in BigQuery. Don't really have a background in this area, but rather a front end marketing person who plays around in GA.

I understand GA can import data directly to BigQuery. But we don't have the resource or knowledge to turn these into proper tables or know what to look for in these.

Did a demo with with Windsor and it looks good for what we need. Though it runs into the 10 dimension limit, which I believe the native BigQuery/GA does not have.

• How are others using Windsor or alternatives, structuring their requests and managing the metric/dimension fields?
• Are you basically re-creating and choosing the fields that you already see in the GA interface reports?
• If I re-created those separately as requests (eg. Acquisition and Events), how would managing the overlapping fields be like to create one report? Because in GA you can add a secondary dimension for example to the traffic report and overlay an event name
• If so, is there a resource I can find online?

I tried to search, but no success in finding what I was looking for, maybe the question I'm asking isn't the right one. The fear here is, we can look at nearly everything but in 2 months time, a question might come up with the data we haven't included in the initial fields.

Any direction would be helpful.

Search for It you see few plugs doing amazing job good luck to all

EDIT: Just want to thank everyone for their willingness to share ideas and give advice. I am so appreciative. I'm back at work today and will be going through your replies in context of my work - will be responding individually as I go. Thank you!!

I've been hired as a digital insights specialist and I use GA4 as my main reporting platform, combined with behavioural insights from a heatmapping tool the company also uses. I've been at the company for about 9 months and everyone has told me the learning curve is steep and I've made decent progress over my time. Yes I'm still feeling very insecure. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to give any meaningful insights for a couple reasons, especially on seasonal campaigns we run to acquire appointments. Biggest issues are:

- Our data isn't great. It's there, but it's messy and often just leads to more questions than answers. There's some unreliability to it and a long history of GA4 implementations changing hands. There's no one I can discuss anomalies with, because everyone else is hands off. I'm kind of my own island within my dept.

- I have an appointment booking event that fires, but i can't seem to attribute it to the campaign landing page. I can create a closed funnel report to show how many people come directly from campaign landing page to booking an appointment, but the abandonment rate usually looks very high... Probably because people might take several different paths before actually booking. So far, I can't seem to find a way to truly answer the question "how many people booked an appointment after seeing the campaign page, whether directly after or later on in their website journey?" And that's a big problem.

(If anyone has specific advice on solving this one, if love to hear it)

- I have no insights into ads performance, don't even have access to the platform. Another dept handles that. I feel a little blind to the strategies that drive traffic to the landing pages I'm reporting on. 

- I used to have access to the CRM data in my last job, but that's also a different dept now. So I have no "true" counts to compare my samples GA4 data against. 

Separate from the technical side, this is a new role for me. I was more a generalist before, reporting was something I did with a long list of other responsibilities - most of which were more website operations based. I fear I'm just not good at creating a story with analytics. Im fine to make obvious insights or regurgitate the metrics, but anything deeper than that, I feel like i just can't get there. 

Im scared I just don't have enough if the "analysis muscle" to succeed here. It's really shaking my confidence and combined with some of the weird data I see, it makes me extremely uncomfortable to present campaign insights to stakeholders and management. I think half my issue is I'm not confident in the metrics I am putting forward.

Does anyone in a similar role have advice on how to improve or move forward? Anything from general or very specific. I really love this company and my team - I want this job to work out so bad.

Hi

I recently seen my domain's Organic sessions is totally equal to engaged sessions, which results in 100 % engagement rate and "0" bounce rate.

I have checked real time, debug, GTM but found everything fine.

But can't able to figure out the issue, can anyone help me with this.

I need to know when organic sessions is same as engaged sessions which is not possible.

Where to check and what to sort?

Thanks in advance.

Been working on GA4 sites after working in Amplitude for years. Does GA4 really have no way to filter by country? Frustrated if true as it would really help us keep our data cleaner. This kind of thing is exactly why ai don’t use Google if given a choice. Thanks

I understand traditional SEO pretty well, but GEO still feels a little new to me. I’ve been looking into enterprise GEO agencies, and I’m curious how businesses actually decide which one to work with. I’m also wondering how they measure results. With traditional SEO, you can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track things like website traffic. What tools or metrics did you use to decide whether the investment was worth it?

Some businesses plan weeks ahead while others plan months out. Curious what works best for different store sizes.

I've started running ads across a few different platforms and my UTM links are getting messy fast. Between Facebook, Google, newsletters and different campaigns, I feel like I'm constantly creating slightly different versions of the same URL.

I also want to keep the links organized so I can actually figure out where clicks are coming from later.

What are you guys using to manage this? Spreadsheet, link management tool, something else?

Hur funkar de för er att göra analyser med Claude? Jag har provat en del olika skills men tycker ofta att de blir fel eller att den hittar på saker, räknar fel osv.

Hi everyone, this might be a stupid question, but I'm pretty new to this.

I recently launched a website with a cookie banner and set up GA4 and Google Search Console. A few days later I noticed that on one day, GSC showed 28 clicks from Google, but GA4 only showed 15 sessions for that day.

That made me curious, so I also added Umami analytics to the site. Now there's a clear difference between the two over the same period:

Does GA4 only collect data from users who accept cookies, while Umami counts more people? How does that work exactly?

And if someone asked me how much traffic my site gets, which numbers should I give them?

Thanks!

Hey everyone! Would anyone be willing to lend me access to a Google Analytics account for a little while? I’m doing a practical task for a job application and need to test some GA4 filters/report customizations.

I won’t change or delete any existing data/settings — I just need a safe environment where I can practice the filters. If anyone has a test/demo property they could share, I’d really appreciate it! 🙏

When I’m looking at a tracking setup, I usually don’t start by checking every event one by one.

I’ll take one conversion that actually matters to the business and follow it all the way through.

Usually I’m checking:

• Where the user came from
• Whether the conversion fired once, not twice
• Whether the important details came through properly
• Whether the lead or order actually reached the CRM or order system
• Whether the final outcome can be matched back to what the website reported

That one check usually tells you pretty quickly where the issue is.

Sometimes the problem is attribution. Sometimes it’s duplicate firing. Sometimes the lead simply never made it into the business system.

For me, it’s a much quicker way to build confidence in the number before digging through every tag.

What do you usually check first before you trust a conversion number?

Used to be Singapore more

I recently joined a new organization and one of my responsibilities is managing their Google analytics. In a GA4 roll-up (consolidating the main domain and 2 subdomains) property, I'm seeing rows where New users is much higher than Total users, and sessions per total user is way past anything a real person would do. I haven't been able to pin down why. We use a blended reporting identity.

Google's docs say new users can exceed active users but shouldn't exceed total users, and that thresholding can cause discrepancies.

My question is, what would you recommend I check to diagnose this issue. Has anyone else seen this issue in GA4? Could it be a consent mode issue? Is there a way to tell thresholding from modelling when the data quality icon isn't showing anything?

Ho creato un sito così per gioco, e piano piano ha iniziato a crescere.

Vorrei monitorare la crescita, su Google Analytics come devo tenere sotto controllo?

Attualmente guardo le statistiche degli utenti attivi e delle visualizzazioni.

Ho iniziato a usare anche Google Search Console e uso le statistiche del Rendimento.

Ci sono altre statistiche diverse che posso aiutarmi a capire come agire sul mio sito?

Grazie.

I’m a beginner building a web service by myself. Our internal user_id is already a random UUID.

For GA4 User-ID, which approach is commonly used in real production services?

1. Use the internal user_id directly
2. HMAC/hash the internal user_id
3. Create a separate random ga4_id only for GA4

There are no existing users yet, so adding a ga4_id column would be easy.

I’m mainly curious about what people actually use in production and why.

hi everyone,

i've been using Umami Cloud for the past two years for my personal projects, but noticed that all history older than 6 months was deleted (which is pretty frustrating, even if i understand that they cannot keep all user data).

as im still a student on a small budget, i host my projects on a small VPS and wanted to switch to a self-hosted analytics solution.

but WHY does almost every modern tool require Node.js / Docker with heavy background services, while lightweight alternatives either look like they were built in 2010 or lack essential features like events, funnels, and clean session tracking?

am I missing something here? im not saying it's easy to build, but im surprised i couldn't find anything that seems to fit my needs

because if there really is nothing low-resource and GDPR-friendly im seriously considering building my own ultra-lightweight PHP + SQLite solution from scratch.

hi guys i see a problem on dasboard of analytics the charts of users every minute in last 30min didnt show i use other gmail and use private window and disable all extennsions same problem is there any solution