Google Analytics Audit Test #

100

Source Mismatch to Referrer

Why It Matters:

Critical to understanding where your traffic is coming from and assigning appropriate credit.

Industries:

All

Checks For:

Accuracy

How accurate is your recent data?

Insight Category:

Attribution

Can you tell which marketing efforts are working?

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Background

A GA4 audit is essential for uncovering missing insights—key data points that organizations don't yet know and can act upon. A well-done audit evaluates both behavioral tracking and traffic attribution, ensuring each is accurate and useful. It also assesses whether the data collected truly supports business decisions and reporting.

Test Detail

This test identifies cases where there is a mismatch between the Google Analytics source/medium and the actual referring URL.

This typically indicates a failure in proper UTM tagging, incorrect attribution by Google Analytics, or a configuration issue with redirects or cookies.

A mismatch can cause:

  • Paid traffic being counted as organic or direct
  • Referrals showing up under the wrong source
  • Inaccurate ROI and channel performance reporting
  • Loss of granular campaign insights

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Google Analytics audit test results.

How to Conduct This Test

Basic Tests

  • In Google Analytics > Explore, create a report with:
    • Dimensions: Session source/medium, Session referrer
    • Metrics: Sessions, Conversions
  • Look for inconsistencies, such as:
    • Sessions labeled google / organic with a non-Google referrer
    • direct / (none) sessions with a clear third-party referrer
    • facebook / paid_social sessions missing UTM tags and showing organic or referral as referrer
  • In BigQuery, query the session_source, session_medium, and page_referrer fields together to spot anomalies.
  • Seeing sessions with referrers that don’t match their source/medium? That’s a signal attribution isn’t working as intended.

Automated, Free Audit

Want to find these mismatches automatically? Run our Instant Audit

Or hire a pro to get to the bottom of your attribution inconsistencies.

How To Fix

  • Ensure all marketing links are properly UTM tagged:
    • utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign are required for paid traffic
  • Audit your redirects, link shorteners, and landing pages to preserve query parameters and gclid/fbclid/msclkid values
  • In Google Analytics Admin, define custom channel groupings to better map common traffic types
  • Use Google Analytics DebugView to validate how source/medium is set on live traffic
  • If you rely heavily on server-side tagging, make sure the original referrer and UTM parameters are passed correctly into Google Analytics
  • Hire a pro to clean up your tagging infrastructure, resolve attribution mismatches, and ensure your reports reflect real traffic sources.

Tips from a Google Analytics Consultant

Focus on Insights

Every Google Analytics audit should result in a plan for more insights.

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An insight is:

  • something you don't know
  • and can act on to improve performance

The Goal

Identify and remove insight blockers. Don't get tempted to track things you can't act on!

Hire a Google Analytics Consultant
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