Understanding Data Discrepancies

It's not uncommon that Growlytics sessions and other numbers may differ from other vendors like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc. This article will help you understand how Growlytics tracks users and sessions.

Highlights

1. Time Zone: Data ingested by Growlytics are timestamped in UTC but in the report, you see the data specified in the time zone of your account (mentioned while setting up the account).

2. Web bots & Scrapers: Growlytics' intelligent source identification mechanism makes sure bots and scrapers are ignored for session tracking. Bots like "Googlebot" or any other data scrapers are ignored. This can be the reason you are seeing the discrepancies in a number of sessions.

Google Analytics Discrepancies

Though Google Analytics and Growlytics track sessions similarly, the following table outlines factors that cause a discrepancy in your session numbers.

Scenario	Growlytics	Google Analytics
Time hits midnight	Session continues	The current session ends at 11:59 PM and the new session starts at 12:00 AM.
Campaign source changes	Session continues	New session begins even if it is within the 30-minute threshold.
Session Event Limit	No limit	After the first 10 events, tracking is limited to 1 event per second.