Why You’ll See Discrepancies in Google Analytics Reporting

Surfside’s fully connected marketing platform attributes in-store and online sales directly to your ad campaign via direct eCommerce and Point of Sale Integrations. Our attribution methodology is based on a view-through attribution model, which means after a user clicks and/or views an ad, we then observe whether or not the consumer makes a purchase within a defined attribution window after that exposure/engagement event. Since many people have multiple devices, and make purchases online and in-store, Surfside deploys a sophisticated customer graph that allows us to use online marketing IDs, emails and phone numbers to directly attribute a transaction and Order ID to a Surfside delivered advertisement.

Campaign analytics flows through our self-service reporting dashboard, so advertisers can visualize the exact transactions, orders and ROAS tied to every aspect of your ad campaign. We also allow for a number of custom offerings, allowing our advertisers to choose their own attribution methodology (first-touch, last-touch, multi-touch) and even select custom attribution windows. When running with multiple media vendors or utilizing multiple measurement platforms, it is always important to understand the measurement methodology and attribution window as it is very common to have data and results not match when comparing platforms. As a lot of advertisers rely on Google Analytics as their source of truth, below are a number of reasons why data in your Surfside Dashboard may not align with what you have access to within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Solely Relies on UTM Parameters and Cookies for Attribution

UTM parameters within the clickthrough URL allow advertisers to break out specific traffic in Google Analytics (GA). When a user initially clicks on an ad, they are directed to the landing page which contains the UTM parameters. This allows GA to associate traffic to that UTM source. The downfalls of UTMs are that if the user leaves the page and then goes back to the advertiser’s website, the UTMs fall off therefore making it more difficult to attribute any related/future traffic associated to the original ad. Google also utilizes cookies for web tracking, but a users’ cookies are not shared across devices, which can cause gaps in attribution, especially since most consumers own at least 2-3 devices. Improving on UTM measurement, identity graphs have become industry standard to enable cross-device measurement and repeat visitation.

Google Analytics and Surfside Have Different Attribution Models

GA functions on a last click attribution model, which assigns 100% of the credit to the marketing touchpoint a customer last engaged with before purchasing. This is inherently flawed, as it does not assign any credit to previous influence that other marketing touchpoints had to drive a consumer to purchase. Surfside uses a multi-touch methodology, which assigns value to all marketing touchpoints within the conversion funnel.

User Behavior Preferences within the Programmatic Space

Programmatic ads are fantastic at driving brand awareness and educating the user on your brand, but the consumer often needs to be exposed to the ad a few times prior to making a purchase, which is why we strive for a minimum frequency of 2-3x per user. After analyzing thousands of programmatic campaigns, we've found that it is not uncommon that after users are exposed to the ad, they’ll either search for the brand or type it directly into their browser to ultimately make their purchase. Since UTM parameters fall off after a user leaves the initial landing page and cookies are not shared across devices, this user’s activity is no longer attributed to Surfside in Google Analytics, therefore giving little to no sales attribution to Surfside.

Google Analytics was Built to Grade… Google Advertising Products

Google Analytics was built to best measure Google specific products (such as Search or Organic traffic). GA tends to naturally favor search since it’s attribution model measures on the last touchpoint with the consumer, which is commonly the search browser. All mediums (SEO, Search, Organic, Display, Native, etc..) will have very different attribution models and conversion times. Due to this, there are flaws with using an analytics platform that has a rigid attribution model that favors their own proprietary products. 

Sample User Path:

Based on this path - this sale would be attributed to Organic or Search traffic since that is the last medium the consumer used, even though the Surfside ad is what originally brought the user to the site