Question from Reddit user:
Hi,
I’m trying to compare each visit with an other tracker tool as there seems to be sessions missing.
What I’m trying to get, is a report that would shows me: Each visitors on my website, what pages they visited, how long and when
Anyone able to help me with this? or point me to a good resource/direction?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
There is no single, standard Google Analytics (GA) report that will show you every single visitor’s page path with timestamp and duration for the purpose of session-level auditing and comparing against another tracker tool.
GA’s architecture aggregates data for performance, not for raw, event-level auditing.
The closest you can get within the GA interface is the User Explorer report, but it still doesn’t provide the raw timestamp of every pageview needed for a direct comparison.
The excellent solution is to use the Google Analytics Data API to export the raw event and session data and then use a reporting tool like Looker Studio to reconstruct the full session paths and visualize the timeline, which is essential for accurate session-by-session comparison.
The long answer is:
The reason you can’t find this report is due to how Google Analytics (both Universal Analytics and GA4) processes and stores data.
GA is built for aggregate reporting, not for a literal log of every user interaction down to the millisecond.
It calculates metrics like ‘time on page’ and ‘session duration’ based on the time difference between subsequent events, which can’t be reliably reversed into a full timestamped timeline for every single pageview within the standard reports.
The User Explorer report in the GA interface provides a good overview of a single user’s activity and path, but the level of detail is insufficient for a precise session-by-session audit against a third-party tracker.
To truly audit and compare session completeness, you need to extract the raw, unaggregated data.
The most effective way to do this is by using the Google Analytics Data API to pull key session dimensions and metrics, such as the Session ID, Client ID/User ID, Page Path, and the Event Timestamp.
This API extraction gets you the core building blocks of your session data.
Once you have this raw data, you need a powerful tool to reconstruct the session journey.
You can use the Looker Studio API to feed this raw data into a dashboard.
Looker Studio allows you to create calculated fields and custom visualizations where you can group all events by the unique Session ID and then sort them by the raw Event Timestamp.
This lets you visually map out the exact sequence and timing of a single visit, making it much easier to pinpoint the missing sessions or events when comparing to your other tracker.
Furthermore, to eliminate discrepancies caused by client-side tracking failures, an excellent preventative solution is to implement server-side tagging using Google Tag Manager and a custom hosting environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
This setup captures user data on your server before sending it to GA, bypassing many common browser restrictions and ensuring a more complete and reliable stream of event and session data for both your GA property and your internal tracker, thereby making your session reconciliation audit much cleaner.
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