6200 FB Landing page views, 165 sessions in GA4. Need help!

Where are all the users?

We recently ran a meta campaign in Saudi Arabia with LPV conversions as objective. We encountered a huge difference in reported link clicks → LPV’s → GA4 sessions. We need help identifying what is causing traffic not reaching the site/being reported in GA4. Is it perhaps fraud traffic?

With all placements activated in the campaign - almost all spend initially went to the FB video feed. After not seeing any traffic in GA4 we turned that placement off and then FB feed ate almost all spend. We then tried IG placements only and that seemed to perform better at least in terms of link clicks/Lpv ratio. Obviously not wanting to throw money in the ocean we were left to pause the campaign in order to solve the traffic issue.

Super grateful for any help on identifying the problem and ultimately resolving the issue.

/Jonas

Some Notes:

FB campaign in Saudi Arabia.

4 days period.

According to Meta:

6200 LPV’s

According to the sites GA4:

165 sessions

Pixel and GA4 setup is correct and all fb-traffic is utm-tagged. GA4 data is analyzed atleast 48hours after the campaign period. GA4 is browser/cookie based (not Server side).

Possible influencing factors: IOS opted out-safari users and fraud traffic?

Last edited by @jonas2 2023-03-15T10:19:23Z

Hey @jonas2 good question and thank you for showing enough detail that we can give you a decent answer.

@whoiseddie @jessica_best @fred.pike Any thoughts on this one?

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I’m not sure on this one. Only guess/question would be are you seeing sampled traffic in GA? Probably not at those numbers, but if your total site traffic is high and you don’t pay for Google Analytics, sometimes it samples.

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Site is fairly new i should say, so not much traffic at all.
Roughly 400 visitors last 14 days

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That’s a tough one. I would suggest setting up visitor recordings on landing pages (e.g. Hotjar) to see if that offers any insights. More importantly, I’d take this discrepancy up with Meta to investigate as that’s who you’re paying.

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One thing I’d look at is overall traffic to the landing pages, and filter it down to traffic from Saudi Arabia. Do the numbers come any closer? If the numbers are close and there are a bunch of “unassigned” or “other”, then that might be pointing to the issue.
I’m not sure this will help in your instance, but just for the heck of it, change the Admin > Reporting Identity to “device based”. If you’re being affected by thresholding, that might give you a more complete picture. And no need to worry about changing the reporting identity - it’s non-destructive and reversible.
Finally, I’d look at the utm’s and make sure they’re all lower case and correspond to what Google is expecting, as defined here, under “channels for manual grouping” and shown in the attached screenshot: [GA4] Default channel group - Analytics Help

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Hey @jonas2,
Can you please check if ‘Google Signals’ are activated on your GA4 property? If they are activated then Google applies a threshold on the data in the reports. If a threshold has been applied to your account then Google doesn’t show all your traffic (and events and conversions) in the reports.
You can check if a threshold has been applied right after the name of the report.


However, you can see all your data if you choose ‘Device Based’ reporting identity

If the data is still missing, I would recommend checking your cookie consent settings. In my company, no events (data) are logged in Google Analytics before cookies are accepted by the website visitor.

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Overall traffic is not even close to the LPV’s reported by facebook unfortunately. Its like 300 sessions total traffic to all the (3) landing pages compared FB’s reported 6k+ LPV’s.

No thresholding, atleast says “unsampled data - based on 100% available data”. Tried the device based too, but no difference.

Utm_source value was actually wrongly set “meta” instead of “facebook” which i read could lead to some traffic being attributed to direct/none instead of paidsocial. However even summing up all acquisition channels the traffic amount doesnt come close to FB’s reported amount of LPV’s.

Appreciate the help Fred!

Thanks for the advice Robert!

I’ll make sure to install MS clarity for when we try FB for this client again.

Talked to Meta, here’s their very diplomatic response:

" > We did check the information from our end and so far, we did not see any issues from our end that case a difference on conversion count. We want to set proper expectations that Meta Ads Reporting conversion counts may be different for the 3rd party tool that you are using. We expect these inconsistencies because there can be differences in how different tools define and calculate conversions."

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Hey Sasho!

Google signals is not activated and data in reports is based on 100% available data, nothing sampled.
Tried the device based option still, but no difference.

The cookie consent settings might be something!
I will check cookie bot settings, not at all impossible that the client has the same consent settings as you by default.

Thanks for the help!

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Client has the same default setting in cookiebot, so that events are not recorded before consent is given. However, in the cookie bot report there is only 400-something users that either denied or accepted consent during the specific period. 179 denied.

So even if everyone in the cookiebot gave consent and were tracked as sessions in ga4, we’re still miles away from 6,2k LPV’s

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