Reply To: Google Analytics 4 and BigQuery: How to Get Accurate Event Counts by Event Name

[Isabella]

There could be a few reasons for discrepancies between your BigQuery data and GA4’s total events report data. One such reason could be due to data latency. BigQuery typically takes 24-48 hours for normal data availability, and GA4 data could be bit more real-time. If your timeframe is within this latency period, you could be looking at different sets of data. Similarly, data processing in BigQuery might face some delay causing event_count_via_concat, event_count_via_countif, and event_count_naive to be vastly different.

Another reason could be the fact that GA4 also has some data processing restrictions like processing thresholds, which could be leading to exclusion of some hits from your dataset. There might be certain events which are not being recorded and hence, the mismatch.

Your usage of count(distinct) could also cause issues if you have very large datasets, as BigQuery approximates the results for large numbers of distinct values. Also, since you’re pre-filtering the data with the WHERE clause, the GA4 might be including other events than ‘job_search__search’ in its total count.

Also, if you’re filtering specific hostnames, please ensure those are not filtered in GA4 as well. If the filter of hostname is done at the view level in GA4, there might be further slight discrepancies.

And lastly, it might be worth checking the device.web_info.hostname itself. If there are problematic and inconsistent entries, this could skew the data.