Solved: GA4 UI vs BigQuery Export - Paid Search Difference... - Page 2

danilomozeli · 01-25-2024 07:01 AM

Hi,

We are having problems to math Paid Search traffic source ( session based ) between GA4 UI and BigQuery Export. Can someone help?

Problem: Session Traffic Medium doesn’t match between GA4 Export and GA4 UI.

GA4 Export in BQ: Almost all session medium are associated with organic or referral for google source traffic ( unnest(event_params) as ep where ep.key = "medium") - and we were expecting to see cpc. The cpc appears only in the user_medium - which is the traffic_medium column which is related to the user acquisition (very first access) NOT the traffic acquisition.
GA4 UI: There are several session where the session medium is set as cpc ( session traffic medium ) that doesn't exist in BigQuery

We've followed the the article below ( session based queries )
ga4bigquery.com/traffic-source-dimensions-metrics-ga4

@ms4446

hwestberg

We are experiencing the same issue and it's a massive headache. We export GA4 data from BigQuery and it gets used in many downstream reports. The issue seems to be specific to Google and Bing.

Events that are clearly google/cpc (have a gclid present) are almost always tagged as google/organic and have no other auto-tagged params. Often, no campaign name is present. It could be a tagging issue, but we've checked campaigns and can't find any glaring issues. I'm having to ask marketers to auto-append utms to separate event parameters and then I remap them correctly in our warehouse. This is incredibly frustrating, especially since Google Ads and GA4 are both Google products

Is there any work being done to remedy this problem? I've seen references to this issue going back over a year, but no official direction in GA4's documentation. Even Google's new AI tool is telling me this is a known issue... Given the fast-approaching deprecation of UA we are in a bit of a bind here. Thanks.

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GA4 UI vs BigQuery Export - Paid Search Differences