Referral traffic Snowplow vs. GA

[Jeffrey Lek]

Hi all,

I am trying to compare the traffic I see in Google Analytics to that in Snowplow. Overall, sessions, pageviews etc. match up pretty well. A problem arrises when I look at the sources that the traffic came through. Whenever a UTM paramater is in place, there doesn't seem to be a problem. When there isn't however, Snowplow doesn't seem to catch referrer URLs in a lot of cases where GA does. An example of this is traffic that comes through Facebook organically.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

Thanks,
Jeffrey

[Alex Dean]

Hi Jeffrey,

Could you provide a list of Facebook domains that are not being matched by Snowplow? It could be that the database in the referer-parser project needs some additional domains for Facebook:

https://github.com/snowplow/referer-parser/blob/master/resources/referers.yml#L128

Thanks,

Alex

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[Yali Sassoon]

Hi Jeffrey - also remember to check the refr_ fields (particularly refr_medium, refr_source). 

In GA data from the referer fields and campaign attribution parameters is combined to set the marketing data.

In Snowplow we take a different approach - we give you the underlying data so that you can combine it anyway you want. That means data based on the referer fields is in the refr_ rather than mkt_ fields. Our approach is described in more detail here: http://snowplowanalytics.com/blog/2013/05/10/where-does-your-traffic-really-come-from/.

HTH!

Yali

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[Jeffrey Lek]

Hey Alex and Yali,

Thanks for replying. Maybe I wasn't clear in my description. I checked all available fields, including refr_medium and refr_source and used this info to reconstruct the Facebook traffic. But even then there's a significant part of the sessions missing. According to Snowplow these visits came directly to our website, but Google Analytics tells me differently.

Best,

Jeff

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Jeffrey Lek

Marketing Intelligence Manager

OUTFITTERY GmbH

www.outfittery.de

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[Christophe Bogaert]

Hi Jeffrey,

In certain cases, Google Analytics uses previous campaign data if the referrer is missing: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6205762#flowchart

I have attached a query we have used in the past to recreate some of this logic for comparison purposes.

Christophe

Snowplow Analytics

The Roma Building, 32-38 Scrutton Street, London EC2A 4RQ, United Kingdom
+44 (0) 203 589 6116

+44 (0) 7598 006 851

[Jeffrey Lek]

Hi Christophe,

Thanks a lot for this reply. I've always had my suspicions that GA was doing something like this, but had never found it documented anywhere before. Strange that is not common knowledge as far as I know.

Cheers,

Jeffrey