Struggling with “not set” or too much “Direct” traffic in GA4? Use Tracks Explorer to fix and diagnose session attribution errors.
Seeing “not set” or too much “Direct” traffic in your GA4 reports?
You might be dealing with session start errors—a common issue that can break attribution, inflate session counts, and damage decision-making.
In this video, we’ll show you how to:
- Diagnose session tracking problems in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
- Fix misfiring session starts that lead to incorrect traffic sources
- Use Trackingplan’s Tracks Explorer to inspect real session data and catch errors in real time
- Ensure your attribution is accurate and your reporting reliable
Learn more about it in this blog post.
Transcript
let's talk about a common issue many of you might face when it comes to tracking attribution in your analytic setup so here's the situation you might be seeing some broken sessions or incorrect attribution data which is causing confusion about how your traffic and user behavior is being tracked well let me show you how to troubleshoot that with Trackingplan first off if you're dealing with multiple properties it can get noisy and confusing especially when you're working with things like session start events with Trackingplan we have the advantage of separating out properties clearly when looking at session data when I go into the properties tab I see that there are 22 events firing that property by clicking on it I can get a detailed list to see how things are behaving here I'm reviewing the session start events this parameter is like the backbone of sessions and tools like Google analytics when a session starts Google automatically assigns a session ID and a session number but here's the catch if session start fire incorrectly your session data gets fragmented leading to problems like inflated session counts misattributed traffic or distorted conversion rates here's the thing for almost every page view a session start event is also triggered Almost 100% of the time this means the number of sessions being counted is totally off as you typically expect something like 20 30 or 40% of page views to trigger a session start depending on the behavior of your users if it's more than half like in this case case it is as if the session is resetting every time they visit a new page to dive deeper we'll use tracking plans tracks Explorer this tool helps us inspect individual sessions let's take a look at a random session I'll pick one that's already finished so we can avoid real-time data disruptions We'll add parameters like session start session ID and campaign traffic when we look at this data it's clear the session starts are misfiring every time there's a new page view see how multip session IDs are being created in a single user Journey this means that when you're calculating things like new users returning users or session counts all of that data is totally incorrect but here's the good news in this case UTM are being persisted throughout the user Journey which is awesome for attribution even though the session data is broken you're still tracking campaigns properly however there's one thing you should keep an eye on if the conversion happens after multiple sessions and the UTM gets lost in the process it could show is not set in your attribution reports so make sure you're not losing that UTM data to sum it up if you're seeing strange session Behavior or attribution issues tracking session starts and session IDs properly can make a huge difference with Trackingplan you can dig into this data catch errors early and fix them before they mess with your reporting if you want to learn more about how to debug tracking errors continue exploring our videos or get in touch with us thanks for watching watching and happy tracking [Music]
