What might interfere with Google Analytics pageview tracking?

3
votes

I'm using Google Analytics to send and track a registration goal, based on a custom pageview.

Basically, every time a user registers and gets redirected to dashboard, I trigger a custom pageview using JS:

ga('send', 'pageview', {page: '/gapv/registration/success'});

The tracking works. However, when I compare the GA tracking with the number of registrations from the database of my website, the GA goal completion always shows around 10% less registrations.

I checked the tracking on various desktop browsers, all seems to be fine. Additionally, I hear that content blocking on mobile browsers gets more and more popular.

Is it possible that browser content blocker plugins might block my custom pageview from being fired? I send the pageview on DOM ready.

What else might explain the difference between my DB results and the GA goal count?

Any ideas are very welcome.

1
google-analytics

1 Answers

3
votes
  • Users can opt-out from Google Analytics
  • Depending on where your tracking code is placed users may leave the page before the hit registers with GA (i.e. users might leave before the DOM is ready - can you move your tracking to pageload ?)
  • Some Ad blockers block GA, too (some claim this is especially true if you use the "advertising features")
  • There might be occasional javascript errors that prevent tracking (or users do not have javascript enabled at all)

As a serverside mechanism your database will be more reliable. While you may be able to bring the discrepancy down to single digits it is not likely that the numbers precisely match (even if you do server-side tracking with GA via the measurement protocol you still have to respect user opt-out).