How does your Klaviyo Active on Site Metric compare to Google Analytics Users Metric?

We have been digging into the Klaviyo analytics recently and have found some results which seem strange, so I wanted to reach out to this community and see if others are experiencing the same results. The analytic is question is “Active on Site”. When we compare Klaviyo “Active on Site” to Google Analytics “Users” metric we see about a 1:7 ratio. This means if Google says we had 10,000 unique users (NOT sessions) on our site in one day, then Klaviyo will typically report approx 1,400 “Active on Site” events in the same day.

According to Klaviyo, this is how their tracking system works: “When you add Klaviyo's web tracking to your site, we only track the browsing activity of "known browsers" — i.e. browsers that have visited and engaged at least once before. Klaviyo will not track anonymous browsers.”

Given the fact that Klaviyo only tracks “known browsers” it makes sense that their visitor count would be lower compared to Google Analytics, but it seems strange that it would be 7 times lower, especially since a large number of our customers have active accounts with Klaviyo.

I’m curious what other Klaviyo users are seeing. Is your Klaviyo to Google Analytics (or whatever BI tool you use) ratio similar? or Better? or Worse?

Mark

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Hey Mark,

What you’re seeing is pretty standard in my experience. Google Analytics will do a much better job of tracking overall site visitation while Klaviyo’s Active On Site metrics is better suited for monitoring how your engaged Klaviyo subscribers are interacting with the site (and for build great flows and segmentation).

Hey @motionrc,

Echoing @Akers Digital’s insight, in my experience, this is a pretty common experience! As you’ve mentioned, an Active Onsite metric/event cannot track anonymous browsers. This also extends to users who may have cleared their cookies, are using incognito browsers, or VPNs that mask and/or strip cookies. Similarly, Google Analytics will track a unique user as someone who visited your website for the very first time.

To put this into a scenario, if I were to visit your site while using my work laptop, browsed around, then decided to subscribe to your newsletter via a signup form but then continued browsing your site on my lunch break on my personal phone; Google analytics would detect this as two separate unique users while on Klaviyo, this would still only be seen as one Active Onsite event. This disparity would broaden, if I decided to return to your website but from my own personal tablet after work.

Keep in mind not all site visitors will be cookied via Klaviyo to trigger an Active Onsite event either. This means that there could be anonymous site visitors that will be tracked via Google Analytics that would not be tracked in Klaviyo. In fact, some of these site visitors could be tracked multiple times as unique users in GA if they’ve used multiple devices and/or constantly using an incognito/private browser but never actually ended up being cookied by Klaviyo.

I hope this helps clarify some things!

David

I appreciate the feedback everyone. I fully understand that GA is always going to count more users than Klaviyo for the reasons offered above, I was mainly looking for feedback on the ratio. I just wanted to know if 1:7 was in line with what others were seeing.

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