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This discrepancy might arise from the differences in how UA and GA4 handle and interpret data. UA is session-based while GA4 is event-based. GA4 does not automatically remove bots and spiders from the data, while UA does. This could potentially inflate your user count significantly in GA4.
Furthermore, GA4 handles new users differently than UA. In UA, a new user is defined as the first session by a user during a selected date range. In GA4, every event that doesn’t explicitly specify a user ID or a device ID is counted as a new user, which naturally inflates the new user count significantly.
Lastly, consider that GA4 might count users across devices and platforms by default if they are logged into their Google account, rather than treating each device as a separate user like in UA. This could also inflate the user count in GA4 if your users tend to switch devices or browsers.
For these reasons, comparing UA to GA4 in terms of user count isn’t like comparing apples to apples. These platforms have fundamentally different methodologies for tracking users and events, making direct comparisons difficult. You might want to take these differences into account when interpreting data from GA4.
