One of Match2One’s promises is to reach relevant audiences and bring high-quality traffic to your site. Of course, besides our claims, we're also trying to deliver proof of them, and in most cases, you'll be looking for validation in Google Analytics.

Probably every marketer out there struggled at least once with discrepancies between Google Analytics and other digital marketing platforms. Most of the concerns come from a lack of understanding of what metrics these platforms show and what methods they actually use to track user activity. We’ve already described these differences and the reasons for discrepancies, but what about the quality of traffic? Is, for example, the Bounce Rate that you can see for Match2One campaigns in GA relevant to the whole traffic?

The metrics you see in your GA account do not represent the complete picture of traffic. In fact, you’re only looking at that part of the traffic that Google has qualified and approved. The reason for that is differences in events qualification, including data collection process for GA, landing page quality and speed metrics, or data loss due to landing page technical issues.

Why is this happening? Google uses different traffic quality filters compared to other platforms, like Match2One. Therefore, different user events can be qualified differently in these platforms for one of the following reasons: invalid domain, invalid IP, suspected domain detection tampering, and others.

In our latest Traffic Quality report, we’re trying to give you a more realistic picture, breaking down what you can see in GA into relevant traffic parts:

When GA tracks a click (session) they also store all the related UTM tags that you can set up for your Match2One campaigns. To be able to match click information between Google and Match2One, we’re using the utm_content tag through which we’re getting information on the specific auction and campaign ID. When we fetch this data back, we can match click (session) from GA with existing data in our auctions feed by auction ID.

In the 1st version of the report, we're showing metrics you're familiar with from GA:

Soon: Due to Univeral Analytics being deprecated and replaced with the new Google Analytics 4 version, we decided to measure and compare the newly introduced metrics, like Engagement Rate and Average Engagement Time, but also Average Session Duration and Spend. With the last one, we want to ensure you know how much and what you’re paying for.

To make it easier for you to refer to specific data, we’re also showing metrics you’re familiar with when looking into Google Analytics - Sessions and Match2One - Clicks. This way, together with using the ‘’Campaign’’ filter, you’ll be able to refer to and verify traffic quality for specific campaigns.

Our goal is to prove that the traffic that Match2One campaigns are bringing is of high quality - we want to provide more transparency into the GA numbers you’re used to looking at. We also want to make the users aware that Google is not the only source of truth when it comes to measuring website traffic.

To be able to see the traffic quality report, you need to connect your Google Analytics account. Check our GA integration guide to set it up.