Data Analysis News
Data Analysis News
Whether you’re a charity, a business, a digital marketer, or simply a data enthusiast, it pays to stay up-to-date and in-the-loop with news and insights from the ever-proliferating world of data analytics.
Data analysis is the bedrock of good business strategy, allowing you to effectively allocate resources, know exactly where and how to optimise content, identify trends and patterns in their early stages, and make predictive assessments that’ll help you get ahead of competitors.
Especially with the recent move from Universal Analytics to GA4, it’s vital for advertisers to keep up with new GA4 features as they’re rolled out and refined.
Discover all the latest developments here, with succinct commentary by our industry experts.
Civic Cookie Control May Be Inflating Your Sessions Data
09/08/23
We’ve recently noticed in some clients’ accounts an issue with Civic Cookie Control and GA4, causing discrepancies between actual and reported sessions data.
Civic’s cookie implementation has been overwriting Google Analytics cookies, so that on each page a new cookie is generated. Because the current page’s cookie is completely new, Google is reading and reporting that as a new session, meaning sessions are being inflated in GA4.
If your cookies are being hosted by Civic, or you’re unsure which service is hosting them, this is definitely worth a check.
From what we’ve seen, the fastest method to check whether your cookie implementation is affecting your sessions, is to go to Engagement Overview in GA4 and compare page_view and session_start. If session_start is almost the same or higher, that’s a sign to then compare your GA4 data against UA.
The fix to the problem on the backend is for your web developers to go into Civic cookie settings and manually set the _ga_<Tag Manager ID> cookie to a wildcard.
For a refresher on the role of cookies and how they work, who not take a look through our Cookie Explainer Series?
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