Comparing page views between two tools is never recommended because of obvious differences between the two at a functional level and also on how they operate. However, what if someone from your team does this comparison anyway and wants to identify why the page views between two tools is different. Below are some of the top checks you should make :
- Cookies support : Check for the cookies setting for both of the tools. One way to check this in Adobe Analytics is to go in to the Report Suite and look at privacy settings. To get a more granular look at the data – download the data from Data Feeds or Data Warehouse
- Check the rules firing : Put up your _satellite.setDebug(true) and check the rules firing order. Look out if the beacon is sent only once. In case of Google Analytics check for multiple tags and if they have the same UA ID. You can use omnibug which makes debugging more visual
- Check the timing of tags firing : It might be the case that time delay might cause users to bounce off from the page before a particular page view is recorded. One issue we found recently was that Adobe Analytics would wait for Target Library load and hence delay sending of beacon. Solution for this is to upgrade the extensions from Launch
- Check for custom events: It might be the case that custom event might be broken or incorrectly set up. In addition to that check if Virtual Page Views are enabled on your site from Google Analytics. Virtual page views inflate the numbers
So, these are the top few checks that I recommend doing when comparing page views between Google Analytics & Adobe Analytics. A difference of 10 to 20% can be expected but a difference of more than that better be investigated.