Question from user:
My vendor and I have been running a campaign via DV360 for one of our clients. We created a landing page for the client where we track phone calls, thank-you pages, and other events via GA4. Additionally, all our other media channels (Meta, Geofencing, etc.) are UTM-tagged, allowing us to track the source/medium for each channel. This gives us a clear view of leads, calls, and users interacting with the website during our campaign.
I understand that soft metrics like link clicks don’t always translate 1:1 with GA4 sessions due to privacy restrictions and cookie limitations. However, this discrepancy seems more pronounced when analyzing DV360 data.
Example:
- Meta (December Data)
- 13,947 link clicks
- 12,498 GA4 sessions
- Not a perfect match, but fairly close.
- DV360 Lead Gen Campaign
- 8,607 reported clicks
- 143 reported conversions (tracked through click-to-call and a soft lead button event on the landing page)
- GA4 Data:
- 67 sessions reported
- 0 soft leads or calls attributed to the source/medium
Upon further investigation, I noticed that some landing page query strings containing utm_source=youtube were attributed to Google CPC instead of YouTube/DV360.
The Question
Why is our YouTube/DV360 data not appearing correctly in GA4? This issue seems unique to DV360/YouTube, as our other channels track properly. Despite DV360 reporting conversions, we can’t connect them properly in GA4—possibly due to tracking loss or being overwritten by Google CPC attribution.
Side note:
This issue also persists within other third party platforms that do display/OTT advertising. Our
Has anyone encountered a similar issue? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
My vendor and I have been running a campaign via DV360 for one of our clients. We created a landing page for the client where we track phone calls, thank-you pages, and other key events via GA4. Additionally, all our other media channels (Meta, Geofencing, etc.) are UTM-tagged, allowing us to track the source/medium of traffic and measure leads, calls, and user activity during our campaign.
I understand that soft metrics like link clicks don’t always translate 1:1 to GA4 sessions due to privacy restrictions and cookie limitations. However, this discrepancy seems more pronounced when analyzing DV360 data.
Example:
- Meta (December Data)
- 13,947 link clicks
- 12,498 GA4 sessions
- Not a perfect match, but fairly close.
- DV360 Lead Gen Campaign
- 8,607 reported clicks
- 143 reported conversions (tracked through click-to-call and a soft lead button event on the landing page)
- GA4 Data:
- 67 sessions reported
- 0 soft leads or calls attributed to the source/medium
Upon further investigation, I noticed that some landing page query strings containing utm_source=youtube were attributed to Google CPC instead of YouTube/DV360.
The Question
Why is our YouTube/DV360 data not appearing correctly in GA4? This issue seems unique to DV360/YouTube, as our other channels track properly. Despite DV360 reporting conversions, we can’t connect them properly in GA4—possibly due to tracking loss or being overwritten by Google CPC attribution.
Additional Context
- Our GA4 attribution model is set to Data-Driven, but we are open to testing other models if that could resolve the issue.
- This discrepancy also occurs with other third-party vendors running display/OTT (streaming) ads to a landing page. While streaming traffic behaves differently, I wanted to mention it in case it’s relevant.
Has anyone encountered a similar issue? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Your significant tracking discrepancy between DV360/YouTube reported clicks and GA4 sessions is a classic symptom of poor integration and client-side tracking limitations, specifically with video and display advertising where clicks often do not result in immediate, attributable sessions due to factors like fast-clicking, high bounce rates, and user privacy settings blocking the necessary tracking parameters (gclid, UTMs).
The observation that utm_source=youtube is being misattributed to Google CPC suggests an issue with how Google’s default channel grouping or cross-product integration is overriding your UTM parameters, or that the traffic is coming through a paid search intermediary before hitting the final page.
The long answer is:
The disparity you’re seeing, particularly the drop from 8,607 reported DV360 clicks to only 67 GA4 sessions, is far more extreme than the Meta example and points to a critical breakdown in your tracking methodology for display and video campaigns.
The minimal session count and zero attributed conversions in GA4, despite DV360 reporting 143 conversions, suggests a near-total failure to pass attribution data to GA4.
This isn’t just a standard discrepancy; it indicates a loss of the session itself or the critical parameters.
For YouTube/DV360, this is often compounded by the nature of video ads where users may click accidentally, leading to a high proportion of “phantom clicks” that never fully load the landing page and thus never register a GA4 session or fire a page_view event.
Crucially, the observation that utm_source=youtube is showing up as Google CPC is a strong indicator that Google’s proprietary auto-tagging mechanism (or cross-channel default channel grouping logic) is overriding your manual UTMs, or the user journey involves an intermediary paid search click before the final landing page, with the search click taking attribution priority.
To solve this, you need a robust, server-side data infrastructure that can reconcile the click and conversion data from multiple sources outside of the user’s browser, bypassing the client-side issues of ad blockers, ITP, and GTM tag firing limitations.
An excellent solution involves using a server-side tagging environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform combined with various APIs.
You would use the Google Ads API to pull in the most accurate click data, conversion details, and campaign context directly from Google’s platforms, which includes DV360 and YouTube, and the Facebook Conversions API to ensure maximum capture of Meta conversion data.
All this data, including your GA4 events, can be processed and harmonized on your server-side platform, which then uses the Google Analytics Data API to send fully attributed, first-party data directly to GA4’s back-end via the Measurement Protocol, or to a data warehouse.
This approach eliminates the reliance on browser cookies and GTM’s client-side loading, ensuring that every confirmed conversion from DV360, Meta, or any other platform is correctly matched and attributed, and that standard events like purchase or custom lead events are accurately tracked.
Finally, the Looker Studio API allows you to pull all this harmonized data together into a single reporting layer for accurate cross-channel analysis, providing a unified and reliable view of your campaign performance that overcomes the limitations of client-side tracking and GA4’s default processing rules.
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