Huge differences between GA and Piwik Pro

Hi! We’ve using Piwik PRO since january for SBB and everything looks okay.

  1. For some reason, our client still has a GA running on their website and the reports are way off.
    For april 2023, GA reports 44018 visitors and 64308 in Piwik PRO. The website is www.sbb.be. D you have any reason for this?
  2. Piwik reports sharpspring / email (source/medium) as Direct traffic. Is there away to avoid this? Do we have to setup an entirely custom channel grouping for this? We have no control over the UTMs used by Sharpspring, we can’t change those.

Hi,

  1. Have you checked this article about possible sources of discrepancies between GA/Piwik PRO? Minimizing data discrepancies between Google Analytics and Piwik PRO - #3 by pp.support

You can also take a look at this help center article while investigating the discrepancies: What are visitors and how are they counted? | Piwik PRO help center

  1. In case of sharpspring and email, if there is a specific utm parameter in the URL that are used in Sharpspring or email then you could include them in Administration > Data collection > Campaign parameters

We’re having kind of the same issue here with a client. The users & sessions are matching more or less but the attributed transactions & revenue is much lower in Piwik.

GA: 199 transactions €43,929 revenue
Piwik: 144 orders €28,809.62 revenue

In both instances we’re looking at the same type/calculation of revenue.

Thxs

Cchecking in to see if anyone can jump in on this (last comment) ? @asinior perhaps?

Hi Dave,

From the data alone I’m not able to determine what may cause such differences. It really comes down to how you have your tracking set up and how you process the orders.

In general comparing data using different tools will always lead to certain deviations. Each tool runs on an independent engine to process the data and also uses a different approximation algorithm. Simultaneously there is no strict answer to what might cause such deviation between Google Analytics and Piwik PRO data. Too many various factors can cause such behavior which is impossible to pinpoint.

I would like to share a blog article that might be a good anchor point - The causes of data discrepancies between analytics platforms - Piwik PRO