- Submission numbers in your Marketing Automation Platform
- Analytics collated within GatedContent.com (GCDC) Insights reports
- Tracking events raised via the GCDC Event Manager to your own tracking platforms (e.g. Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Adobe Tag Manager, Tealium, Adobe Analytics etc.)
There can be a number of reasons why numbers between these different sources don't always match up exactly. In some cases, this can indicate a problem that needs resolving. We detail some common questions below with potential reasons for this.
My MAP submission numbers are higher than those in GCDC or my tracking platform
There are a number of reasons why this may happen on some gates:
- Content gates that use gating behaviours to open on page load can raise blind submissions - these will be recorded in your MAP but do not count as user submissions in GCDC or external tracking. Read more about blind submissions here.
- The GCDC script will respect no-track directives and opt-in tools such as OneTrust. Depending on these settings, tracking events may not be raised despite there being form interactions and submissions. Read more about how these settings affect GCDC here.
- Occasionally, on-page script errors can interfere with GCDC tracking. If you are seeing errors within the developer console that originate in your own website scripts, you should ask your web team to review and address these.
- Under rare circumstances, network errors or timeouts can temporarily stop tracking data arriving at its destination. It should generally be assumed that reporting numbers in any platform include a small degree of error to account for issues such as these.
My GCDC or external tracking platform submission numbers are higher than those in my MAP
If GCDC or your external tracking platform indicates a higher number of submissions than that reflected in your MAP, this indicates a potentially more serious problem that should be investigated quickly, as it could indicate data loss. Before contacting GCDC, you should urgently check for and address all of the following:
- 95% of the time, this issue is caused by field validation rules on your MAP form that cause incoming form submissions to be rejected. For example, it may be that a field has been marked as mandatory on your MAP form, but this field is not mandatory on the corresponding GCDC field type, causing some incoming submissions to be silently rejected. You should check every field on your receiving MAP form to make sure that no validation rules are active. If they are, turn them off.
- If you are using anti-spam features within your MAP, make sure these are configured correctly on the GCDC side. If you are using Eloqua anti-spam measures, the details for integrating this with GCDC are listed here.
- Ad-blockers are known to cause submission issues if being utilised by the user. Read more information about ad blockers and mitigation strategies here.
- Further troubleshooting steps for missing submission are listed here.
- If none of the above are responsible for this issue, you should contact GCDC support quoting the gate ID, affected page URLs, and the details of the discrepant submission numbers so we can further investigate.
Other misalignment issues
In general, and as noted above, it's important to consider analytic reports as incorporating a small degree of error, and it is not always the case that all platforms will agree 100% on numbers. In addition to the reasons given above, some of the larger analytics platforms use modelling that can result in slightly different numbers to those captured by GCDC. In general, small discrepancies are considered acceptable. The exception to this rule is where GCDC is showing higher submission numbers than your MAP, which could indicate a more serious issue as detailed above.
As always, if you're not sure please contact GCDC support so we can help you. Always be sure to include your gate ID, page URLs, and details of the reports you are querying.