Reply To: Differences in reference source aggregation between GA4 sessions and exported BQ data

[Jack]

The discrepancies you’re seeing between your GA4 report and your BigQuery results could be due to the way each platform handles ‘null’ or missing referrers. GA4 might be categorizing some sessions with missing referrers as coming from certain sources like ‘app’, whereas BigQuery could be registering these as ‘null’. There might also be differences in how each platform interprets or assigns session data. Since Instagram numbers were almost identical, it could suggest that sessions from certain referrers are more likely to be miscategorized or lost. Getting your utm_source directly from page_location can be prone to inaccuracies if the utm parameters are not consistently used or formatted correctly. To address this, you might want to double-check how you’re setting your utm parameters, and ensure you’re correctly extracting and categorizing referrer information in your BigQuery queries.