What Hidden Traffic Means for Your Pantheon Costs

The Hidden Gaps in GA4: What Your Analytics Isn’t Telling You

Learn Why GA4 Doesn’t Track All Internet Traffic and How This Impacts Your Pantheon Hosting Costs.

First, Some Key Facts:

GA4 Isn’t Designed to Track All Forms of Website Traffic

It Tracks (Some) Engaged Users to Provide Behavioural Insights

A High Percentage of Your Traffic Isn’t Captured by GA4

The Stats That Matter

~25%

Only Circa 25% of Website Visits Are Tracked by GA4

4 x GA4 Sessions

Actual Visitor Traffic
on Your Website

Many Digital Teams Depend on GA4, Unaware of the Traffic It Doesn’t Track

GA4 is not designed to show all types of traffic - it's role is to report a holistic view of user interactions. It tracks individual users' journeys, providing insights into behaviour and engagement. However, it only tracks some of those journeys - see more on that below. It is also important to note that while GA4 provides real-time data, it may not be as comprehensive as some users assume, especially for high-traffic sites, leading to potential gaps in real-time insights - i.e. GA4 applies data sampling to comply with regulatory requirements.

Pantheon’s pricing structure is based on ALL traffic levels, such as internal users, API traffic etc, not just the site traffic that is reported in GA4. Pantheon’s pricing includes the cost of computing resource as the more traffic to a site the more computing resources needed. There is also a very real cost associated with data transfer, such as serving web pages, images etc.

The chart below shows a likely breakdown of all traffic to your website, highlighting the significant amount of traffic excluded in GA4's reporting.

Traffic Source Analysis

The breakdown shows that 58% of the traffic is from 'Human Traffic' while 42% is from 'Bot Traffic.' Although both types are significant, it's crucial to manage Bad Bot Traffic to prevent inflated costs.

Traffic Sources Explained

Automated software programs that perform tasks on the internet, such as crawling web pages, gathering data, or executing scripts. While some bots serve legitimate purposes (like search engine indexing), others may be used for scraping, spamming, or malicious activities.

A type of bot that disguises its identity or purpose to appear as legitimate user traffic. These bots can bypass security measures and are often used for unethical activities, such as content scraping or ad fraud.

Refers to traffic from users who have opted out of cookies or are using browsers that do not support cookies. Cookie-less traffic poses challenges for tracking user behaviour, as it limits the ability to collect data on individual sessions and preferences. Something here about mobile app referrals likely to be cookie-less.

Visits to a website that are not tracked by Google Analytics 4 (GA4), either due to technical limitations, user settings, or the visit not conforming to GA’s definition of a visit. Non-GA4 visits can lead to discrepancies in reported traffic metrics.

Data exchanged between systems or applications through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This type of traffic typically involves requests and responses for data retrieval or interaction with web services, often used for integrations or automated processes.

Individuals within an organisation who access the company’s website or intranet for operational purposes. This can include employees, management, or other stakeholders using the site for administration, content management, or resource access.

The process of regularly checking a website’s performance, functionality, and security to ensure it operates optimally. This includes tracking uptime, load speed, broken links, and compliance with accessibility standards, often facilitated by specialised monitoring tools.

Definition of a GA4 Visit

First-Party Cookie: A cookie that is stored on the user’s browser
Engaged Session Event: When a user stays on a web page for 10 seconds or more, visits another page, or triggers a conversion event

Definition of a Pantheon Visit

A Pantheon Visit is recorded when a unique combination of IP address and user-agent accesses the site within a 24-hour period and meets the following criteria:

Triggers PHP Processing
- Occurs when backend processing is required, such as:
  - Dynamic content rendering (e.g., user-specific pages)
  - Interactions bypassing the cache, such as form submissions
Excludes Certain Status Codes
- Requests resulting in 3xx (Redirection), 4xx (Client Errors), and 5xx (Server Errors) are not counted as visits
  - Example: A 404 error for a missing page or a 500 internal server error does not contribute to visit counts
Excludes Static Assets
- Requests for static files are not counted as visits, including:
  - Images (e.g., .jpg, .png, .svg)
  - Stylesheets and Scripts (e.g., .css, .js)
  - Documents (e.g., .pdf, .docx)

Sources & Assumptions

"GA4 under reports user traffic by between 11% and 55%"
Source: Link
Internal Users amount to ~5% of traffic
Therefore likely to be excluded from GA4 reports
~5% is an estimate
API traffic ~1-5%
GA4 not designed to show this traffic
1-5% is a conservative estimate
GA4 misconfiguration
Source: Link
Source: Link

Bot traffic
Source: Link
Source: Link
Ad blockers - 10-30%
Source: Link
Mobile app traffic 5-20%
Source: Link
Social Media and referral clicks 5-10%
Source: Link
Source: Link
Source: Link

Bots Pantheon Exclude

Traffic from these bots are excluded from Pantheon traffic reports and quotas:

Bot Name
rawler
pider
Yahoo
yahoo
bingbot
archive.org_bot
msnbot

Bot Name
Google
DotBot
AhrefsBot
MJ12bo
YandexBot
UptimeRobot
Cliqzbot

Bot Name
Applebot
spbot
SemrushBot
feed-id
Pingdom
Owlin
BLP_bbot
PetalBot

The Takeaways

GA4 Tracks Only Some of Your Total Website Traffic

A significant amount of visits go unreported

Untracked Traffic Still Matters

Genuine Users and Key Visits Are Excluded From GA4

Plan Around Total Traffic Levels

Estimate your Pantheon Workspace Plan at roughly 4x your GA4 visits to account for total traffic

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