Why does numbers of sessions in HubSpot differs from numbers in GA?

If you use several different analytics tools to report traffic to the website, you may have discovered that the numbers often vary from tool to tool. Why is this the case?

An essential part of today's marketing is analysis. Are we on track when it comes to reaching the goals we have set for the month, quarter or year? How much traffic do we get to the website and how many conversions? To prove that the marketing efforts you do actually work, statistics are absolutely critical.

Because it's such an essential part of our workday, it can be a little frustrating to see that the different analysis tools you use not show the same result. So why do HubSpot and Google Analytics often not show the same amount of traffic to the website, more specifically, number of sessions?

HubSpot’s reporting on traffic versus Google Analytics

Looking at the total traffic trend in the two tools, it will be somewhat the same, but HubSpot and Google Analytics do not show the same number of sessions. Why?

There are several reasons why the two tools show different numbers for the website traffic:

• Sessions
• IP filtering
• Tracking code installation
• Source of sessions
• Cross-domain tracking
• In-app traffic

Let's dig a little deeper into each factor.

Sessions

In HubSpot, sessions include a number of analytical activities taken by a visitor to your website. These activities include page views, CTA clicks, and more. A session expires after the visitor has been inactive for more than 30 minutes.

New sessions begin as soon as a visitor returns to the website after 30 minutes of activity or from a new session campaign, for example, if the visitor returns to the site from another traffic source.

Note, however, that if you have “Notify visitors that your site uses cookies and allow opt-out” setting enabled, visitors who opt out of cookies cannot be tracked over pageviews and each new page view will, therefore, be considered a new session. This can, thus, result in more sessions in HubSpot.

If a visitor has disabled cookies or has installed AdBlocker (which prevents HubSpot from tracking page views), and the visitor submits a form, HubSpot can more accurately record the source of the submitted form.

And what about Google Analytics? In Google Analytics, a session is calculated as each time someone comes to your website from a referral source within a given timeframe. This means that the visitor was on an external site and clicked on a link from a unique source that took them to your website or that the visitor entered the URL of your website directly into the browser.

When a visitor reaches your site, all interactions will be considered as the same visit, until the source changes or the session ends (after 30 minutes inactivity or at midnight – this timeout can be customised in Google Analytics account settings).

IP filtering

In order to exclude your own traffic to your website so that this does not mess with your statistics, it is recommended to filter IP addresses. In HubSpot, the office's IP address, all employee IP addresses and any backup IP address should be blocked.

When you exclude your own web traffic from the HubSpot analysis, the following data is filtered:

• CTA views and clicks
• Pageviews and Click
• Submitted forms
• Social Clicks

The same should be done in Google Analytics by creating IP address filter. If the same IP addresses are not registered in both tools, the numbers, of course, will differ. Also, keep in mind that Google Analytics as default will count preview pages in HubSpot as sessions automatically, which we will talk more about later in the article.

Tracking code installation

If HubSpot or Google Analytics tracking codes are not installed on the same pages on your website, the tools will not record sessions for the same number of pages. The numbers will thus be slightly different.

You can often avoid this by entering the tracking codes in so-called global modules that are used on all pages of your site. If you have your website in HubSpot, simply enter the code into a module, and it will be tracked automatically on all pages you create. You can also use tools like Google Tag Manager to manage your tracking codes.

Source of sessions

Here, too, there is a big difference in how the two different tools measure sessions. HubSpot measures a session based on the reference domain (google.com, facebook.com and so on) that brings a visitor to your website.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, measures a session based on the referral source or medium (Google / Organic, Direct / None, Facebook / Referral) that brings the visitor to the website. This causes some interactions to be counted as separate sessions in a tool, and a single session in another tool.

Cross-Domain Tracking

Cross-domain tracking lets you collect analysis on multiple tracked domains. If a visitor clicks on a link on domain1.com and then on a link on domain2.com, cross-domain tracking will ensure that the interaction is considered as one session.

Without cross-domain tracking, the analysis tool will evaluate this interaction as two separate sessions because the source or reference domain changes. If HubSpot and Google Analytics do not have the same domains enabled for cross-domain tracking, the tools will not report consistent sessions.

In-app traffic

The HubSpot tracking code is automatically prevented from firing on preview pages in your HubSpot tools (e.g., Https: //preview.hs-sites.com/_hcms/preview/content/ ...) or all of the content on the app.hubspot.com domain. This is to ensure that sessions and pageviews are not counted during testing and content production.

However, because the Google Analytics tracking code is added to the header HTML on a HubSpot page, Google Analytics may count sessions to these in-app pages. Therefore, if you see results in Google Analytics with referrals from the URLs above, you will most likely see more sessions in Google Analytics than HubSpot.

To prevent preview pages from being counted in the statistics in Google Analytics, it is recommended that you filter the IP addresses of all internal users of HubSpot in Google Analytics, such as employees, developers, and any collaborators working in the system.