Discrepancies between GA and Piwik PRO

I see discrepancies between GA and Piwik data. Eg. in the Source/Medium report I get these:

Visitors/Users: 1.329 (Piwik) vs. 1.648 (GA)
Sessions: 1.391 (Piwik) vs. 1.722 (GA)
Bounce rate: 83,25% (Piwik) vs. 85,02% (GA)

Only source/medium that matches is direct/none

The same issue with data from Google Ads campaigns.

Can anyone help with that?

Are Piwik PRO and GA set up similarly? How did you install both those products?

Yes there are set up similarly. I uses Tag Manager to set them up.

Could you check some more report? E.g. compare the one with most popular pages. Also check operating systems and devices used. The difference is a bit too high so we have to double check the setup and configuration.

Marketing channels reports are not the best to compare since both tools might have bit different rules here.






Hi Kuba,

I’ve attached you the reports you requested. As you see, none of them correspond.

Hm, most of the difference is generated by Android devices. Are you using mobile app/SDKs or is it a standard web tracking?

Additional things to check:

  • how it compares to GA4? I can see that you have multiple analytics tools installed, some of them using more than 1 property
  • in Piwik PRO you can check tracker debugger to see if there are any excluded events. With such discrepancy you should be able to see something unusual if it’s ~20% of all traffic

It is standard website tracking. I’ve attacked the two tags.


I realised that we had two different Analytics tags from two different properties as you said, so I paused one of them. Hopefully that will work in a couple of day.

I’ll be in touch!

In Piwik Pro tracker debugger I see 102 sessions for the last 6 hours. Is that unusual?

It depends on your traffic. I was more asking about checking if there are any excluded or broken events. You can use the quick filters to make it easier to find:

For the last day I had 1122 unique pagevies. For the last 6 hours I found 11 excluded events and 0 broken events.

I’ve checked the data again and there are still big discrepancies between Piwik and Google Analytics. The same goes for data from Google ads. The data in Oiwik Pro is much lower than in Google Ads.

Can you help?

I’m doing currently a study to compare the data between Piwik PRO and GA3/GA4 and the differences so far are lower than 5%. Piwik PRO tracks more page views. So I’d say that it’s something connected with implementation.

Things that you could check:

  • IP blacklist - confirm that it matches
  • How the same data compares with GA4? I guess you installed GA4 just recently so it’s much more comparable to the installation of Piwik PRO (assuming that it was done via a fresh tag in GTM)

Google Universal Analytics has been there for more than 15 years and in many cases the implementations are much more advanced and lack proper documentation.

In my case Piwik Pro tracks less pageviews than GA3 and GA4.

The IP blacklists matches.

I’ve attached images of Operation systems in GA4 and Piwik Pro. As you see there a differences as well. (24% more visits in GA4 than in Piwik)


@Klovfod Did you check for the following

  1. filters in GA (however, it shouldn’t be the cause)
  2. Having GA implemented in another domain where Piwik isn’t installed
  3. Do you have any third-party GA integration that is sending data to UA via measurement protocol

@jude_nwachukwu

I checked all you’ve suggested.

  1. My filters should match the filters in Piwik Pro.
  2. I don’t have GA implemented in another domain where Piwik isn’t installed
  3. I don’t have any 3. party GA integration

Do you still don’t have an answer to this?

I have two different websites and accounts in Piwik Pro (two different companies) and I see the same discrepancies on both.

I also see a huge difference in the number of internal searched for GAU and Piwik Pro.


Looks like GUA is not recognizing some of the searches. Maybe some of the internal search params are not properly configured?

In GAU search parameters are set up as it should be.

We use ‘q’ as a search parameter

However in Piwik Pro, we didn’t change anything which means that the search parameters are like the attached. Should I delete all other search parameters than q?

If you believe that Piwik PRO reports too much, I’d say that your system uses also other keyword params somewhere else. You can delete others and check if it changes anything. In general, I’d keep the list the same in both Piwik PRO and GUA.