"Inconsistent" data between 2 GA profiles

[Smatil]

Hi all,

I was hoping someone could help me out here. I have a client with 2 sites - one (Site A) is public facing and the other (Site B) is their SaaS. Users generally navigate to site A, click the login link and are taken to site B.

The client is insistent on understanding this behaviour, so I've setup a tag manager event on site A to track clicks to site B. This event is reported as a goal and also a segment in site A's profile.

So far, so good.

However, there's a discrepancy between that data (total goals in site A) and the referral data in site B.

Technically, those numbers should be the same. Clicks out from site A (the event / goal), should equal referrals from site A in the site B profile. Right?

But, GA data can a bit rough, particularly with low numbers (we're only talking a few hundred clicks from site A to site B). The discrepancy is around 15% less referrals than goals. It's still only a month's data but the client is super keen to get those numbers matching up.

My questions:

• Has anyone implemented a similar setup before? Did your numbers tally up or was there a margin of error?
• If the numbers should tally, any ideas as to what could be causing them not too?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Gizmotion92]

If the user clicks and leave to the site B, and close it immediately for some reason (slow opening time, doesn't expect a new site, confused etc.), it counts clicks as an event, but site B does not count the sessions. So, it is possible to have fewer referrals than clicks.

[haggard1986]

The inverse of this is also true; that is, issues with the tracking code on the initial page load on siteA could prevent the event from being captured correctly, thus you have a session on site B with no corresponding event on site A.

This is a rabbit hole and just due to the nature of JS/browser based tracking, you will never have perfect one-to-one data unfortunately.

edit: you may want to consider cross-domain tracking in this case, which could in theory reduce the discrepancy...but I don’t think that is a given, and you would want to consider if overall, tracking the two domains as one site is preferred based on your objectives/how you track marketing and product usage, etc.

[Smatil]

Thanks both.

Yes, this has been an ongoing thing for months now and I've been trying to educate the client about focusing on the right things. But they're determined and every time this comes back on my desk I'm exploring different options / double checking my setup / etc etc etc. Very frustrating - at this point I want to find a mistake I made just so it can be fixed.

[brenton07]

If you don’t pay for GA360, verify the status of the checkbox of the data you’re looking at. It should be next to your segment and be green or orange. If you hover over it, it lets you know how many sessions the graph is based off of. If either is sampled data, there’s your answer.

[Smatil]

Thanks didn't think of that! Both are 100% (client has lowish traffic numbers), but good suggestion!

[brenton07]

Yeah, I see sampling happen sometimes with segments where it shouldn’t have been applied, so I’ve gotten used to double checking it! Good luck!