Missing from GA & Missing from BSD

You may see "Missing From GA" as an Attribution label when looking at Channel Attribution Data.

Missing from GA

If you see a "Missing from GA" channel/vendor value, it means one of two things:

1. The order wasn't captured in Google Analytics, or

2. Daasity isn't able to find a match for the order between your GA data & the ecommerce platform

Orders not captured in Google Analytics

If an order was not tracked in Google Analytics, we will not be able to provide attribution data for it, and all of the GA-based attribution values will be "Missing from GA."

Debugging tip

If an order shows as "Missing from GA" in Daasity but you believe it should be tracked, the first step would be to verify whether it does actually exist in GA.

To do that, you should get the order identifiers for the order and filter the transaction ID within the GA4 reporting interface to see if there are any matching records.

There are a couple identifiers to use in this search, like the order ID, order code, or checkout ID for an order. To assist you in your search, you may want to check with the person/agency responsible for your ecommerce tracking to find out which order identifier your site is sending to GA4 as the transaction ID.

If you're not able to find that order anywhere within your GA4 reporting interface, then the root cause is that the order was not tracked in GA4.

If you were able to find the order in GA4, the core issue is likely that our transformation code was not able to match data between systems.

There are a couple reasons why an order might not be tracked in Google Analytics:

The order was not placed directly through your ecommerce site. Orders not placed directly on your ecommerce website won't have any trackable web activity associated with the order, and they most likely will not be tracked in Google Analytics. Some example scenarios where the order would not be placed directly on your ecommerce site: retail orders, wholesale orders, orders imported from another system, and orders placed directly in apps like Facebook or Instagram.

The order was a recurring order. Recurring orders don't involve a purchase action on your site — they're automatically triggered by the subscription platform. Depending on your GA implementation, that means your recurring orders might not show up in GA at all, and will have a "Missing from GA" channel/vendor value. If you do want to start tracking recurring orders in GA, services like Elevar and Little Data can use server-side tracking to do so.

Debugging tip

To see whether some orders are "Missing from GA" because they were placed outside of your ecommerce website, it's helpful to segment Missing from GA orders by Daasity's sales channel dimension. This will help you understand if the orders were placed through your online store or via another method.

In the example below, you can see the majority (86%) of this merchant's "Missing from GA" orders weren't placed on their online store, so it's expected that they would be missing from GA.

(Click the image to expand)

Issues with website tracking / ad blockers. When you're tracking purchases only in the browser via the GA JavaScript snippet, there are a lot of things that can go wrong — scripts taking too long to load, ad blockers in place, etc. — and a percentage of your purchase events might never make it to Google Analytics. If you don't have a server-side tracking solution like Elevar or Little Data sending purchase events directly from your ecommerce store to GA, it's typical that 5-15% of your orders may never end up getting tracked in GA.

Unable to match data between systems

If the transaction was tracked in GA but still shows "Missing from GA," it's likely because your transform code was not able to match the GA transaction ID to an order identifier in your ecommerce platform.

Our default transform code tries to match your GA transaction ID to the ecommerce platform order ID, order code, or checkout ID. If the transaction ID you are sending to GA does not match any of those ecommerce platform order identifiers, we will not be able to match the order data between the systems, and we will display "Missing from GA" for the channel/vendor.

If you send non-standard transaction IDs to Google Analytics and are using our Enterprise product, you may be able to set up custom code that will have a higher match rate than the default matching logic.

Debugging tip

If you see a significant spike in "Missing from GA," compare the transaction IDs before and after the spike. If the format has changed significantly, you may need to either adjust your GA tracking setup or customize your code to account for the new format.

Missing from BSD or UNKNOWN

If you see "Missing from BSD" or "UNKNOWN" for the channel/vendor value, it means we were able to match the order between GA and your ecommerce platform, but your Channel Mapping BSD does not include a rule that matched the order's source, medium, or default channel grouping values.

For example, if an order is tracked in GA with a default channel grouping of "Podcast," but you don't have a rule in your BSD for the "Podcast" channel grouping, then the channel and vendor will show up as "UNKNOWN" or "Missing from BSD."

It's common for this to occur more frequently after you switch to GA4. The reason is GA4 introduced new default channel grouping values that may not have existed when you initially set up your channel-mapping BSD. Read this section of our GA4 Important Notes article for more details and advice on how to resolve this issue.