While change can be good, change is not always easy.
When Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was released out of beta in October of 2020, I don’t know of a single marketer who jumped up and said “I’m going to make the change to that right now.” As digital marketing agencies and in-house teams, we had gotten used to and mastered Universal Analytics (UA) and were comfortable with it. Being on the paid search side, we had learned the ins and outs of how UA and Google Ads worked together, and they did work together quite well. Why wouldn’t they? They are both Google products, getting data from the same place, and are linked through the Google system. They are like siblings who should know each other so well.
Then came GA4.
Preparing for GA4 Migration
Dagmar was ready when the UA doomsday clock showed up. Our team had been collecting data in GA4 for our clients and had completed setup for them well before the deadline. Everything was tested and ready to go for July 1st. For the paid search team, we had imported conversions into Google Ads from GA4 and had been comparing the UA data to GA4 data for a couple of months before we were going to flip the switch and make those GA4 conversions ‘primary’ in the account. We determined that this would be the time to work out the kinks, and any issues would be cleared up by July 1st.
Little did we know…
The Battle of GA4 and Google Ads Begins
We saw discrepancies between conversion data being attributed to paid search in GA4 and what was being imported into Google Ads right away. These weren’t the small discrepancies we saw before with UA due to the day the conversion was credited or attribution. These were sometimes 50% discrepancies for decent size conversion numbers.
Our first call with Google Tech Support, we were told that it was a latency issue. Data was taking longer to get from GA4 to Google Ads, and it could take up to 72 hours for data to show. Despite having plenty of examples during time periods prior to that, we waited.
On the second call with Google Tech Support, we were told that it was because we had not yet turned on Google Signals in GA4 (mind you, each call we went through the process of making sure that GA4 and Google Ads were properly linked.) We weren’t doing remarketing for that client, which we thought was the primary role for Google Signals, but we clicked the toggle to turn them on any way. While we had turned on Google Signals for other clients seeing discrepancies, we did this and waited.
Still seeing discrepancies, we saw a yellow banner at the top of one of our client’s Google Ads account offering a call with a GA4 specialist.
We thought that maybe we had been talking to the wrong people, since the Google Tech Support people we had spoken to previously were a third party working on behalf of Google. We clicked the banner, which took us to a page to request the call. When we selected my client’s Customer ID number, it said that the account wasn’t eligible for the call. This is the same account in which we saw the banner offer.
For call number three, we were told that it was because we had chosen ‘paid and organic channels’ in this admin section in GA4 under Attribution Settings and that it needed to be Google paid channels only:
We switched it, but still wasn’t sure how the previous setting would hinder conversions credited to google / cpc in GA4 from being imported into Google Ads. With fingers crossed, we did this and waited.
On call number four, the discrepancies were due to us removing a conversion action in Google Ads and then adding it back. They even sent a screenshot of when “we” did that. Trouble is, this change was made by the Google Ads system, which is the backend system making automated bidding changes and such. It wasn’t us.
Where It Stands
As of this writing, we are still seeing large discrepancies, and we have another call scheduled with Google Tech Support. GA4 is definitely collecting the data and is working fine. The conversions listed in there for paid search match up with what our clients are seeing on their end. That data is just not making its way into the Google Ads platform. This is for form fills for some clients, call tracking for others. There is no rhyme or reason, but we promise to get to the bottom of it and will update this if/when it all gets resolved.
Or, like in true Google fashion, ‘poof!’ One day it is just all fixed. 😉
Angie Batten
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