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If you\\u2019re an early adopter kind of person, you might have hopped on the Google Analytics 4 bandwagon. The warnings were clear. Do not remove your existing analytics code. Several months later I can see why!

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This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I\\u2019m Dante St James.

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Google Analytics 4 is the update that gets Google ready for a world where there are no cookies to tell us what\\u2019s happening on our websites. It\\u2019s a frightening prospect. No real way of measuring our website visitors. No real way to know what\\u2019s happening on our sites through Google Analytics. But Google reckons their machine learning knows enough about what happens out there to base some pretty tight estimates on.

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At least that\\u2019s the theory. And judging by what GA4 is doing on my sites right now, I\\u2019m not entirely sure that this is going to work.

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For those new to the GA4 game, one of the main things that it can do is understand different events on your website. So instead of treating everything like a pageview, it\\u2019s made to read activities across lots of different device and property types. Not just websites. So that means that it will eventually read different kinds of actions on your website and link together traffic between your websites, web apps and mobile apps to give you a bit more room info on how people move around your online properties.

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But it has a long way to go. And Google agrees on that.

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I have both Google\\u2019s Universal Analytics and GA 4 installed on all my sites. I\\u2019m an early adopter and I like to provide feedback to Google and other companies to help them build better products for us all. That sometimes means that you\\u2019re going to find some funky little issues along the way.

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On one site, I am seeing drastic differences on the number of visits and unique visitors. In this site, where Universal Analytics is telling me that I am getting 1,400 visits from some 1200 unique visitors each week, GA4 is telling me that I\\u2019m getting 485 visits from 400 unique visitors. That\\u2019s not a small difference. That is a massive discrepancy. In that same website I am getting around 800 visits a week from Indonesia in UA Analytics. But in GA4, they\\u2019re showing absolutely none from that country. This site also shows a big difference between views on specific pages. One particularly popular page is showing 1700 views on UA, but less than 800 on GA4. Clearly one is more correct than the other.

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The mystery deepens even further when WordPress\\u2019 Jetpack analytics is showing that I am actually getting twice as many visitors as Universal Analytics is reporting, and 8 times more than GA4 is showing. So who is right?

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Google has long been known to do some algorithmic massaging to the numbers they show.\\xa0 Ever since they bought Urchin statistics, took it off your web server and put it in the cloud, the numbers that your web server showed were completely divorced from the numbers that Google was showing. Google Analytics 4 is then an even deeper algorithmic interpretation than Google\\u2019s Universal Analytics. It\\u2019s trying to make an estimate based on behaviour patterns that\\xa0 may have a little to do with your website, but can have a whole lot of input from other websites and generalised trends that only Google knows. Which means that I am left, as a site owner, unsure of what numbers to trust.

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Google\\u2019s Universal Analytics numbers have been the default way to share your stats since 2013. When someone asks for your site numbers, they\\u2019re asking you to show them your Google Analytics numbers. Any other numbers are considered untrustworthy and subject to interpretation. And I suppose this works. If everyone is showing numbers from the same ecosystem that uses the same algorithmic massaging for every site, then it\\u2019s a fair comparison, even if the numbers aren\\u2019t 100% accurate.

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It goes without saying that I do not and will not trust the numbers from Google Analytics 4 for at least another 2 years. Google has plans to start phasing out UA in late 2022 and they\\u2019re already forcing all new analytics accounts to default to the new GA4 standard.

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But honestly, I would much rather trust what WordPress is saying. While Google is having its tracking blocked almost by default from all iPhones and iPads right now, and almost all browsers apart from Chrome are defaulting to block third-party tracking (which is what that Google Analytics code is), WordPress own internal code on your website is first-party tracking. So it\\u2019s the closest thing to accurate numbers that they may be. That\\u2019s if you have a WordPress website of course. This means that the most accurate numbers for Wix and Squarespace are probably also coming from internally on their sites. And given my own experience that shows that even the long-established Universal Analytics is showing half the numbers of Jetpack on WordPress, I am inclined to believe that Google can\\u2019t see half of my traffic and isn\\u2019t yet smart enough to give it an educated guess, either.

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So while I am forced to share my Universal Analytics with the world, because that\\u2019s what we all do, in the privacy of my own ego, I know that I\\u2019m actually getting twice that audience.

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To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.