MASSIVE discrepancy between SiteKit and GA

Also, GA shows a spike of 6,850% (+139 USERS) for 27FEB24 – SiteKit shows *6* *USERS* (even though the graph header reads “All VISITORS”).

Hi @artdavis thanks for opening a support topic with us and sorry to hear that you are seeing these discrepancies between Site Kit and Analytics. To help you further with this please could you share the following:

1. Your?Site Health information. You can?use this form?to share privately if preferred.
2. Are you currently using Google Ads on your site?
3. A recording of your Site Kit stats with you clicking through to your Analytics account to compare the stats. You can use a service such as Loom for this.

Were your Site Kit dashboard data and Analytics account data previously matched or has this been a problem from when you first set up Site Kit?

You may also find our Using the Site Kit dashboard page useful for more information on each section of the dashboard. Let me know if you have any questions in the meantime.

Before I engage in all of this busy-work, please answer my questions.

A great number of people appear have this same issue.

@artdavis I’d be happy to answer your question with regards to the visitors vs users. Where Site Kit refers to ‘visitors‘, this is the same metric as ‘users‘ in the Analytics platform reports. It’s the total active users since GA4 was introduced, which is ‘users’ in GA4.

The information shown within the Site Kit dashboard pulls information from a users Analytics account using the Google Analytics reporting API, so typically the figures should be similar for the same metrics.

I hope this helps to answer your question and I will be happy to look into this further for you if you could please share the information requested above.

It doesn’t answer my questions: if “visitors” and “users” are the same metric, why isn’t the terminology consistent between the applications?

And yes, the figures definitely SHOULD be similar — in fact, they should be identical, yes? If SiteKit is reading data out of the Analytics database, the values should be equal. So how is it even remotely possible that they’re not? And how are SO MANY people having this exact same issue?

@artdavis Just to clarify here that from the Analytics platform, ‘Active Users’ is what’s highlighted as ‘Users’.

Site Kit checks “Total users” and this is what’s shown in the “traffic” section as ‘All Visitors‘. If you’re filtering by Country or Device it shows ‘Active Users’. Site Kit stayed with “Total users” as it mirrored what was highlighted for UA previously. You can find more information on ‘Total Users’, ‘New Users’ and ‘Active Users’ here.

You will also need to account for API reporting periods for Site Kit which report up until the previous day. This means you may see some slight discrepancies between the data you see in Site Kit and what you can see in your Analytics account.

As mentioned above I’d be happy to help troubleshoot this with you if you are seeing large discrepancies with your Analytics data. Please can you share the information above and I can help you with some further suggestions.

See what I mean by a convoluted mess? Nobody has hours a day to try to figure out how to use Analytics / SiteKit, and frankly most of us use SiteKit so we can get a “quick and dirty” view at what’s going on without wading into the morass of Analytics.

As to your requested information:

1. How is my site health information going to help you resolve this issue? What are you looking for, specifically?

2. No, we’re not using Google Ads.

3. You don’t need a recording; I’m happy to provide screencaps.

@artdavis Sorry to hear that and we do look to make Site Kit as simple and easy to use for our users sharing the relevant stats for their websites.

1. The Site Health provides a lot of useful information for us related to your current setup, third party plugins installed which can sometimes help identify conflicts, useful information on your Site Kit setup and more.
2. Thank you for confirming this.
3. No problem and screencaps would be helpful for us if you could share those that would help. Feel free to share those in the private form above when sharing your Site Health Information.

Let me know if you have other questions in the meantime.

Obviously it provides “a lot of useful information”, but what are you looking for, specifically? How does anything I have going on on my site prevent SiteKit from properly reading data out of the Analytics database? It seems pretty clear that you’re looking for something(s) specific that could cause problems… what is it? This seems like a fishing expedition.

@artdavis At this stage it is unknown as to why you have discrepancies between your Site Kit data and the data you can see in Analytics. Your Site Health Information could provide some insights as to why this may be such as a plugin conflict, misconfigured or altered Analytics code among other things.

As it is unknown at this stage I can’t say exactly what we are looking for but the Site Health Information could help point us in the right direction. It’s difficult to troubleshoot this with you without this information. We are of course limited to support for the Site Kit plugin here but I am happy to help where I can with this to help find a solution to this for you.

We have been seeing reports of Analytics data drops in recent weeks which are related to the introduction of the?Digital Markets Act (DMA)?that requires companies to obtain user consent before they can collect personal data. This may not be applicable to you but please do take a look at our consent mode page for more information.

One place you can also try is the Analytics Help Center who may be able to share more insights on your Analytics data specifically.