Discrepancies between dianomi reporting and Google Analytics reports are normal because of differences in reporting methodologies. That said, both should follow similar trends. The following campaign example indicates some discrepancy between Google Analytics and dianomi reporting, but the overall trend is similar.
Let’s explore some of the reasons for those discrepancies:
Google Analytics site implementation A common reason is not implementing Google Analytics properly on all article pages across the site, especially on newly added sections, leading to some of the dianomi traffic not getting tracked by Google Analytics.
Partial page load Visitors may navigate away from the site before the page is fully loaded and Google Analytics tracking code executes, recording the dianomi traffic.
User browser preferences Visitors may have set their browser privacy preferences to disable cookies, images, or JavaScript making them non-trackable by Google Analytics. The same goes for users that have installed Google’s opt-out add-on.
Google Analytics Sessions vs. dianomi Clicks There is a distinction between Clicks recorded by Dianomi and Visits/Sessions recorded by Google Analytics. While Dianomi records a Click anytime a user clicks a content recommendation on a publisher site, Google Analytics records a single Session/Visit for all user interactions within a given time frame (which expires after 30 minutes of inactivity). For example, if a user reached the marketer’s site through Dianomi twice within that time frame, he or she will be recorded as just one Session/Visit.
Google Analytics sampling preferences Unlike dianomi, the free version of Google Analytics data is generally based on the sampling of all visits to the site, rather than the whole incoming traffic. Google Analytics uses sampling to generate reports on very large data sets (over 1m visits).
Time zone differences dianomi reporting is currently still based on UK (GMT) for all global markets. If Google Analytics is using a different time zone, the daily reporting might have some differences.
dianomi UTM tag implementation Marketers can get a more accurate view of their dianomi traffic by implementing a UTM tag for their dianomi campaigns. They can then see their campaign-specific traffic on Google Analytics under “Campaigns” rather than under the more limited “All traffic sources”.