[Dakota]

Troubleshooting tracking issues for a specific event like ‘purchase’ might involve a few different steps. One possibility could be a change in your site’s purchase confirmation process or checkout page — if the structure of that page changed significantly, and Google Tag Manager was reliant on certain elements of that page to initiate the ‘purchase’ event, it might have stopped working. Possible solutions might include adjusting the setup of your ‘purchase’ event in Google Tag Manager to reflect the new page structure, or reverting the changes made to your checkout page. It might also be worth checking to see if there have been any updates or changes to the GTM or GA4 platforms themselves that could be causing the issue — sometimes, platform updates can cause compatibility problems until old setups are updated to match. It’s also worth checking the health of the codes and scripts related to the ‘purchase’ event, anything from a simple syntax error to unidentified variables might be the cause of your problem. Having a developer go through these considerations might quickly resolve the issue.

[Dakota]

To convert your Universal Analytics events to GA4 events, you can use the GA4 Measurement Protocol API. This protocol works a bit differently from the previous one. In GA4, instead of events being categorized under Event Category, Action, and Label, data is sent as event name and parameters. The event name can be any string and you are allowed to send up to 25 additional parameters with each event, which can be values or nested parameters. For example, in your case, the ‘Stream’ category can likely be the event name and ‘Listen’ can be a parameter for that event. There should be similar restructuring for other parameters as well. It’s also important to note that some parameters are reserved for automatically collected events and you should avoid using these names for your custom event parameters. Ensure to check the GA4 documentation for more details.

[Dakota]

Yes, it appears there’s a discrepancy between the session counts in the GA4 user interface and those resulting from your BigQuery query. The difference seems large, considering the same sources and date ranges have been applied in both cases. You’re absolutely right in identifying unique sessions by combining the session ID and the pseudo user ID. However, this discrepancy suggests there may be an overlooked aspect in your query or a difference in how GA4 and BigQuery are filtering and counting sessions. It’s also worth ensuring that the data in BigQuery is up-to-date and that there is no lag or delay in data availability affecting your results. A deeper investigation would indeed be useful to identify and fix the issue.

[Dakota]

It sounds like you’re experiencing a rather unusual issue. Given that your other projects continue to operate normally, it’s unlikely the issue is with the BigQuery service itself. Rather, the issue is likely specific to the project that’s experiencing the problem. There could be a variety of reasons for this – perhaps there’s an issue with the data itself, or maybe there’s an issue with the permissions or configuration of that specific project.

Whatever the cause, resolving the issue will probably involve some investigative work on your part. First, you might want to check the data being exported to see if anything looks amiss. For instance, are there any new or unusual data sources being included in the exports, or is there any missing data?

Next, you could check to see if there were any recent changes to the project’s permissions or configuration that might have affected the exports. For instance, did someone modify the project’s BigQuery settings, or are there new firewall rules in place?

Finally, it might be worth seeing if there are any error messages or logs associated with the project that could give you a clue as to what’s going on. In particular, you could look for any BigQuery-related errors or warnings. If all else fails, you could try reaching out to the BigQuery support team for help.

[Dakota]

I hear you, it’s frustrating when things don’t quite line up. I think what you’re experiencing might be a limitation with GA4. If you’re open to exploring third-party solutions, there’s a very capable platform called Able CDP. It has its own tracking and connects directly to BigQuery, which makes it really convenient in Looker. The best part is that it provides raw tracking data without any sampling, so you might find it more accurate and helpful.