While I think most of us are familiar with/have encountered discrepancies between GA and Google Ads or other platforms, this one has me rather stumped.
A new client's reporting has always seemed a little bit unusual to me. Until recently, I haven't been able to put my finger on why, but I always felt like the numbers being reported seemed inaccurate. Today a coworker and I discovered that the identical report (in this case, a custom dashboard where data is run through a simple logic filter for source and page url) produced wildly different results. In fact, we noticed at least three different results within a 10 minute period!
We confirmed that our date ranges, views, and segments were identical, but at one point the reports even changed with a simple refresh of the page. We couldn't seem to cause this to happen, but we did notice it on newish data (previous month), and old data (9 months ago). That tells me that there isn't an issue with conversions rolling in last minute.
Thoughts on what could be causing this? One of my first tasks in my new role is to migrate reporting from manual pull to GDS, but I'm nervous about the validity of my data if these results can change so much.