Pantheon's pricing model explained
In this article we go into detail about how Pantheon define a 'visit' and why your GA4 reported visit differs from the full picture.
Typically, it's the Visits metric that causes the most concern so this article focuses on that rather than Page Impressions.
Pantheon's Definitions
Pantheon's definition of Visitor metrics:
Visitor
"A visitor is a person or device who/that receives information from the site. The platform counts each visitor once per day, regardless of the number of times they return that day or the number of pages they visit that day."
Site Visits
"We consider a Site Visit as a 200-level (and some 300-levelShow more information) response code in response to a visitor, and we identify unique consumers as a combination of user agent (device/browser) and IP address (network source), as shown in the diagram to the left."
GA4 Exclusions
Single Page Views with No Interactions
If a user lands on a page and does not engage in any interactions (e.g., clicks on links, fills out forms, or triggers events), that initial page view may not count as a session.
Cookies
If a user has rejected cookies, GA4 will not track their interactions or sessions.
Mobile & Mobile App
In mobile applications, if users interact with the app but do not trigger any events that GA4 recognises, those interactions may not count as sessions.
GA4 Reports
Typically, most implementations of GA4 have a number of filters setup that would omit data from standard reports. Also, there is some ambiguity over the key, comparable metric of Active Users vs Total Users. Common filters are:
- Internal Traffic
- Subdomains
- Specific Referral Sources may have been excluded
Traffic breakdown
The chart on the left gives an overview of traffic breakdown. You'll see that GA4 reported traffic only makes up 20% of all of the traffic that hits your website.
There is typically 5x more traffic to your website than reported in GA4.
Pantheon's Definitions
Pantheon's definition of Visitor metrics:
Visitor
"A visitor is a person or device who/that receives information from the site. The platform counts each visitor once per day, regardless of the number of times they return that day or the number of pages they visit that day."
Site Visits
"We consider a Site Visit as a 200-level (and some 300-levelShow more information) response code in response to a visitor, and we identify unique consumers as a combination of user agent (device/browser) and IP address (network source), as shown in the diagram to the left."
GA4 Exclusions
Single Page Views with No Interactions
If a user lands on a page and does not engage in any interactions (e.g., clicks on links, fills out forms, or triggers events), that initial page view may not count as a session.
Cookies
If a user has rejected cookies, GA4 will not track their interactions or sessions.
Mobile & Mobile App
In mobile applications, if users interact with the app but do not trigger any events that GA4 recognises, those interactions may not count as sessions.
GA4 Reports
Typically, most implementations of GA4 have a number of filters setup that would omit data from standard reports. Also, there is some ambiguity over the key, comparable metric of Active Users vs Total Users. Common filters are:
- Internal Traffic
- Subdomains
- Specific Referral Sources may have been excluded
Traffic breakdown
The chart on the left gives an overview of traffic breakdown. You'll see that GA4 reported traffic only makes up 20% of all of the traffic that hits your website.
There is typically 5x more traffic to your website than reported in GA4.
Traffic characteristics for different site types
The chart below illustrates how the breakdown of traffic can change for different site types. For example, an Ecommerce site would expect more crawler activity as they are more dynamic, typically more SEO activity and integration with sites such as Google Shopping and other aggregator platforms. A more detailed breakdown is here.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, there are many factors when trying to understand traffic levels further compounded by the vagaries of GA4.
If you need help in understanding more about this topic or would be interested in learning more about the benefits of Adaptive + Pantheon, click here or get in touch.