Dear Technical and Internet Gurus:
Is Google Analytics accurate?
@Teri_Kanefield it's good enough to look at trends but not enough to tie its metrics to a business contract. Too many things can lead to inaccuracies.
@grumpasaurus
Sounds like a "Take it with a grain of salt the size of a cow lick" situation.
@Teri_Kanefield
@Kencf618033 @Teri_Kanefield ga4 simply doesn't make any guarantees in accuracy and most client side implementations of it are subject to client framework, firebase, mobile os, and browser plugin shenanigans.
To make overall marketing decisions or understand your acquisition channels and calculate CAC, yeah it's the best free tool out there.
If you're going to do something like an affiliate payout program, it's not the tool to use.
All I'm doing actually is getting an idea how many people are there so that when things go wrong on the website I can rule out an overload of users.
@Teri_Kanefield @Kencf618033 because ga4 only provides real time data within the past 30 minutes it may not be the right tool for a Network Operations Center type of situation. GA4 is a reflection of your client application activity vs say a malicious attacker trying to hit your endpoints directly.
It may prove to be a quick sanity check if you don't have anything else though. (Servers reporting high traffic but ga4 reports low users).
In general it sounds like google analytics under reports
@Teri_Kanefield @Kencf618033 out depends on what you're looking at. In general "full data availability" isn't available for at least 8 to 12 hrs. If that's not what you're referring to it can be the result of a multitude of things from ad blockers to overall how your client app was built