GA4 introduced the concept of ‘data streams’ to Analytics properties which allows creators to wholistically see their audience across different areas of their business, like a website and an application. By default, GA4 reports will show data from all data streams combined into one place with the option of filtering for each stream if you choose. Most creators we work with will only have one data stream for their website, so our application currently only accepts one data stream.
If you notice the pageviews that are being pulled into your application are dramatically different than what you expect, take a look to see if you have more than one data stream set up. In particular, we’ve seen many sites that use MonsterInsights have a new data stream automatically created by the plugin, which is actually causing pageviews to be counted twice.
To check your true pageviews, navigate to the Engagement > Events report and click the plus sign (+) next to the ‘Event name’ heading to add a secondary dimension then choose Stream Name. Don’t forget to set the date range to the last 30 days in the top right corner!
If you see two streams with very similar pageview counts like the example above, that means the pageviews you’ve been relying on up to now have been inflated. Both of these streams are tracking about the same number of pageviews and then Google is rolling them up in reporting and displaying the sum of those pageviews. Unfortunately, the sum of the pageviews from those data streams does not accurately reflect your true pageviews. Your accurate pageviews would be closer to the number in one of those data streams.
If you see two streams but one of them doesn’t have many pageviews, then the total pageviews will be fairly accurate. In this example, the second stream isn’t tracking much so this site does actually have about 97,000 pageviews.
When submitting your application, if you have multiple data streams, be sure to pick the one that best represents the true amount of traffic visiting your website. If you didn’t intentionally set up multiple data streams, you can delete the extra one(s) by following these instructions.