Struggling To Understand Why Android Unique Visitors & Visits Are So Much Higher Than Google Analytics' user & session metrics

Question

We have implemented Adobe Analytics in my organization and we are currently in the process of rolling it out across the business and using it as our source of record for all things Analytics. One issue that has been raised though is that our overall traffic in Adobe Analytics is much higher than what we see in Google Analytics. We have found that the discrepancy is being driven mainly from our mobile application traffic, and solely within the Android operating system. While I understand that the collection methods differ slightly and there will always be a difference amongst platforms, I am trying to understand why that difference is SO large for the Android platform

I took a look at a day's worth of data for Monday 7/31/23. For iOS mobile app traffic only -- I see users (unique visitors in adobe) and sessions (visits in adobe) are well within our tolerable delta with Adobe +3% and +5% on unique visitors & visits respectively:

Date	Platform	OS	Unique Visitors (Users)	Visits (Sessions)
7/31/2023	Adobe	iOS	274,459	380,860
7/31/2023	Google	iOS	266,965	361,438
∆	3%	5%

However, for this same day's worth of data -- on Android -- we see that Adobe is exponentially larger across these two metrics:

Date	Platform	OS	Unique Visitors (Users)	Visits (Sessions)
7/31/2023	Adobe	Android	247,949	381,109
7/31/2023	Google	Android	104,292	144,043
∆	138%	165%

I have consulted with my mobile application dev partner who led the implementation of the Adobe Mobile SDK on our app. They have not come back with anything concrete yet, so I was hoping I could share this with the community and see if anyone had any reasons as to why we are seeing such higher traffic in Adobe for only Android devices?

Any help and/or insights here would be greatly appreciative. I have been banging my head against the wall on this one for a while and genuinely interested to find out why this is the case. Is it real traffic that Google had not been collecting properly? Anything will help us out tremendously at this point.

Thank you for your time.

Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted Answer

Well I'm sticking around to keep helping the issue...

For Adobe, if you have AEP Assurance Extension installed, that is a great tool for testing your implementations. If it's not installed, I highly recommend it... this is a game changer for testing.

If you have never seen that tool, we did a session on it in our User Group, you can watch the recording here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jgNm_cggLM

Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, GA is a pain to test!

Now, for Adobe, with the AEP Assurance extension, you will be able to see the unique user ECID value (MID / mcvisid - on all hits), as well as the Launch number (on lifecycle hits).

Also, keep in mind that how Adobe and GA record sessions may be different, and it's possible you have differences in your settings between your 2 OS for your Lifecycle settings... or maybe they are the same, but could be very different from how GA records the session... this may simply be a matter of a timeout setting?

Adobe allows for a lot of customization in the mobile app, from configuring your Lifecycle metrics, to session timeout, etc.

So while I can't really help much on debugging GA (you are at the mercy of the Firebase debugger there), Adobe should be very easy to test and make sure you are seeing the behaviours you want/expect to see.

Jennifer_Dungan · Answer

Without getting into the whole GA vs AA comparison... I do have point out that for Mobile Apps, your GA data is reliant on Firebase.. and as much as we sometimes throw stones at GA.... I sometimes want to throw a boulder at Firebase.

Firebase is pretty terrible.. and if you are relying on the "default" Firebase events, I'm going to say good luck getting anything usable...

To put this in perspective.. I've worked on a few app code bases with the developers... One one of the code bases (covering 7 or 8 apps) the default Firebase tracking significantly under counted the page views, I wouldn't be surprised if it missed visits or visitors entirely.. especially for short sessions. The other code base (covering 3 apps) significantly over counted the page views....

And how do I know this? Well I used the Firebase debugger and I could see many pages failing to track at all (though this is also a known issue of the Firebase debugger... if you don't see the event, it might have still sent... the debugger sometimes misses showing entire actions)...but when I say events were missing.. they were missing all over the place... and even when I checked the Dev suite the next day (giving time for the data to process, the hits were much lower than what I tested... and there were other people testing I hadn't even accounted for yet..... and on the other app, I wasn't even doing anything and it was showing page views (because the automatic event detection decided that some of the content loading into the current screen "constituted a whole new page view" o_0

Suffice it to say, I don't trust Firebase's automatic tracking at all....

If you want to improve your mobile apps GA tracking, I suggest turning off Firebase's automatic tracking, and have your developers trigger page view, etc actions manually... this will also allow you to pass Page Names and Parameters into your tracking to get more meaningful information then "XXXViewController" and other garbage values....

However, even with manual triggers, there is still a chance that the values won't match up... GA and Adobe calculate their visits/sessions differently... it's more important that they follow similar trends and are generally within the same reach of one another...

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