HubSpot reports Twice More Direct traffic than Google Analytics

[#1]

I am facing a strange problem. The Source Report from HubSpot has been reporting twice more direct traffic than Google Analytics or other Analytics tools on our site. I  already read two HubSpot articles on the subject:

- https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/reports/why-do-hubspot-and-google-analytics-not-m...

-  https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/reports/why-do-i-have-more-direct-traffic-than-ex...

But none of the reasons mentioned above seems to apply in my case. Did any of you faced the same problem and if yes, what was the solution to solve the reporting issue?

[#2]

Hi @davidbee, thanks for reaching out and for including the fact that you had already gone through the two relevant articles in investigating this problem.

Though there are often some differences in the numbers between HubSpot and Google Analytics reporting, double the traffic in HubSpot would indeed be very unusual.

Can I ask, have you submitted a ticket to the HubSpot Support team through the regular channels regarding this issue? It might be easier to get to the bottom of this through these means, as we would probably need a number of screenshots from your Google Analytics instance and a number of confidential details regarding your reporting. 

However, I would be happy to look into this as well, if you'd like to send me a PM with screenshots comparing the numbers in between your two instances. Let me know, and I will dig into it further!

All the best,

May

[#3]

Indeed I did submit a ticket and here is the answer.

Not sure I got the answer I wanted. Do you see other potential sources for the discrepancies ?

"

When looking at your results from HubSpot and Google Analytics, we recommend focusing on the trends between the two systems – not comparing X visits from Google Analytics to Y visits in HubSpot. This is mentioned in our documentation about the reasons for differences between the two systems: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/reports/why-do-hubspot-and-google-analytics-not-m.... There are many factors as to why the numbers between HubSpot and Google are different including IP filtering, tracking code installation, sessions, source of visit, cross-domain tracking, and in-app traffic.

Primarily, because Google Analytics tracks visits in 30 minute sessions, this is a big reason why HubSpot's metrics are likely to be higher. HubSpot would track many visits during that 30 minutes if the user is going back and forth between your site and an external domain (such as Google)."

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Hi @davidbee,

When we first moved to HS awhile back, we experienced similar discrepencies with the data. For awhile we tried to use both sets and find the commonalities & differences. This proved to be tedious and in all honesty, not that useful. We still reference GA data on some occasions, but we now rely on the HubSpot data 90%+ of the time for a few reasons.

1. This data reports on what really matters: Visits, Contacts, Customers. 
2. It was a waste of time to constantly looking at the 2 data sets when we were making our decisions off of the HubSpot data anyways.
3. We accepted that there are going to be differences because they are going to track in different ways. Because we are dedicated to HubSpot for the long term, we made the decision to only rely on this data for trends and improvements.

I'm not saying this will work for everyone, but it's working very well for us and has reduced the amount of wasted time significantly.