Comments on: Advanced Guide to Page View Tracking in Google Analytics 4

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 13:56:20 +0000

In reply to Kevin.

Hi Kevin,
In my experience this is on the high end, but still ok. There can be several reasons why your count in GA4 is higher with one of them the type of implementation (differs between GA4 and UA in your case).
Do you see this 10% differences across all (main) website pages? That’s something interesting to evaluate. If, on average it goes over 12 or even 15%, then that’s too high in my opinion.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 20:58:07 +0000

Hey Paul,
I know you have a question answered above about a difference in pageviews between UA and GA4. Currently my GA4 property is showing approx a 10% higher number.
Is this normal or is that too much? this number varies from 8% to 12% on various days. FYI, i have no filters setup on either properties and this variation is based on approx 3 million pageviews / day. Additionally, our universal is coded through backend vs our GA4 is coded through GTM. Is 10% a normal difference or should it be less, and if less, what solutions would you recommend to inspect?

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Fri, 19 May 2023 14:21:50 +0000

In reply to Richard. Good feedback Richard, haven't come across this before, but will let you know if I have a useful comment on this!

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 19 May 2023 11:27:24 +0000

Thanks for this – however I came across an issue when i tried to use this method. The page report worked fine, however to see a landing page report using the same values, i filtered pages by session start, however session_start does not fire for custom dimensions. To solve this, I switched the enhanced measurement back on, and instead of using a custom dimension/parameter, overwrote the existing page_location (or page_title) variable with my simplified url in the config tag.
This seems to be working fine – but I’m interested if anyone else has come across this issue and solved it another way?
Hope this helps

By: Lam

Lam — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 01:37:41 +0000

In reply to Paul Koks. OK got it, thank you so much!

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:18:22 +0000

In reply to Lam. Most probably your standard report is suffering from Cardinality. The free-form is more accurate to use as I expect it contains dimension values with low event/user counts where the standard report isn't. I will elaborate on Cardinality in a future article.

By: Lam

Lam — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 11:50:30 +0000

Free Form unique pages is much greater, so which report should I use to show a more accurate result, thanks!

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 10:05:32 +0000

In reply to Lam. Quick question, do you see the same number of unique pages or are the number of unique pages in the Free Form report greater?

By: Lam

Lam — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 08:21:01 +0000

Hi there,
I have created a report with page path+query string under the life cycle report (Engagement > Page and Screen) that GA4 provides and created a same page path+query string report under exploration (using Free form). I have checked the date range is under the same period.

However, the views in the two reports show a great difference, do u have any idea why there is such a significant difference between them??
(Engagement > Page and Screen = 231786 vs Free Form = 473269)

Thanks!

By: Paul Koks

Paul Koks — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 11:12:27 +0000

In reply to Arun. In that case you could overwrite the 'page_location' parameter for these URLs in the GA4 configuration tag. But make sure that the pageviews are sent as expected after you implement this override.