--- title: "Numbers Lower Than Another Tool" description: "Why Sealmetrics can legitimately report fewer (or more) visits than GA4 or another tool: entrances vs sessions, bot filtering at ingest, and no sampling." canonical_url: "https://docs.sealmetrics.com/troubleshooting/lower-numbers-than-other-tools" lang: "en" date_generated: "2026-09-02T09:19:10.533Z" source_hash: "04a872708e2596919f488abf912263a2adb86a48a8907cf3bbe39a27d1f9a31e" content_type: "documentation" owner: "docs" llm_priority: "useful" source_file: "troubleshooting/lower-numbers-than-other-tools.mdx" publisher: "Sealmetrics" --- # Numbers Lower Than Another Tool Canonical page: https://docs.sealmetrics.com/troubleshooting/lower-numbers-than-other-tools Two analytics tools measuring the same site **never report identical numbers** — they count different things, filter different traffic, and cut the day at different moments. Before treating a gap as a tracking bug, check whether it is explained by these legitimate model differences. If, after accounting for them, the gap is still large and unexplained, then troubleshoot it as missing data. --- ## 1. Entrances are not GA4 sessions Sealmetrics' primary traffic metric is the **Entrance**: it counts a new entrance when a visitor arrives with an empty referrer or from a different domain than yours. There is no session timeout, no session re-opening after 30 minutes of inactivity, and no session splitting at midnight — because all of those require persistent identifiers Sealmetrics deliberately does not use. GA4's *session* is a different construct (timeout-based, identifier-based), so comparing Entrances to Sessions is comparing two different definitions — a stable percentage difference between them is expected and not a bug. Read the definition in full: [How Sealmetrics Calculates Entrances](/reports/insights/how-sealmetrics-calculates-entrances). **What to check:** compare like with like where possible (Pageviews against Pageviews is far closer to apples-to-apples than Entrances against Sessions), and compare **trends** rather than absolute values. ## 2. Bots are filtered at ingest Sealmetrics rejects known bot and tool traffic **before it is stored**: hits from search engine crawlers, SEO tools, link-preview fetchers, uptime monitors, HTTP libraries, and headless/automation browsers never enter your reports, and burst behavior (many pageviews from one session within seconds) is rate-limited too. See [Bot Detection & Traffic Quality](/security-privacy/bot-detection). A tool with weaker (or different) bot filtering will report that traffic as visits. This inflates the *other* tool rather than shrinking Sealmetrics — but from your point of view it looks the same: "Sealmetrics shows less". **What to check:** in the other tool, look at the traffic Sealmetrics doesn't show — hostnames, user agents, datacenter-heavy geographies, sessions with zero engagement. Bot traffic usually concentrates in obvious pockets. ## 3. No sampling, no consent loss — the gap can point the other way Sealmetrics processes **every hit** it receives: reports are never sampled or modeled. And because it is consentless, it also measures the visitors who decline or ignore a consent banner — traffic that consent-gated tools structurally lose. On sites with a consent banner, Sealmetrics typically reports **more** traffic than GA4, not less. So the *direction* of the gap is diagnostic: | Observation | Likely explanation | |---|---| | Sealmetrics moderately below the other tool, stable ratio over time | Definition differences (entrances vs sessions) and bot filtering — expected | | Sealmetrics above the other tool | Consent loss and ad blockers hitting the other tool — expected | | Sealmetrics drastically below, or the ratio suddenly changed | A real tracking problem — go to the checklist below | The full side-by-side comparison of both measurement models is in [GA4 vs Sealmetrics](/faq/ga4-vs-sealmetrics). --- ## 4. Conversions on pages that navigate away immediately This one is specific to **conversion counts**, and it is the usual answer when your own tag manager or server log says an event fired but it never reaches the Conversions report. A conversion call has to execute *before* the browser leaves the page. Sealmetrics dispatches hits with `navigator.sendBeacon`, which survives page unload by design — so once the call runs, the send is safe. The risk is the call never running: a tag bound to DOM-ready or window-load on a page that redirects a few hundred milliseconds after it opens. The flows where this concentrates are the ones built out of redirects — links from business listings, ad platforms that bounce through a redirector, and any chain that lands, counts, and forwards. **How to tell it apart from a missing pixel.** Take the conversions you believe are missing and split them in two: | What you find for that visit | What it means | |---|---| | No pageview recorded at all | The tracker never ran on that domain or page — a coverage problem, not a timing one. Check the pixel is present on every hostname in the flow ([Unauthorized domain](/troubleshooting/unauthorized-domain)) | | Pageview recorded, conversion missing | The visit was tracked but the conversion call didn't execute in time — a timing problem. Move the call earlier, off DOM-ready and onto the earliest event that carries the data you need | A domain showing **100% loss** is always the first case, and it is worth checking before anything else: it means the pixel simply isn't there. **If you are comparing against a Sealmetrics v1 period,** expect v1 to be lower here. v1's transport did not survive fast navigation the way `sendBeacon` does, so redirect-heavy flows lost a meaningful share of conversions on v1 that v2 now captures. A step up in conversions after migrating is that gap closing, not double-counting. --- ## Before comparing, normalize the comparison - **Same date window and same timezone** on both sides — see [Dates & timezone mismatch](/troubleshooting/dates-timezone-mismatch). - **Same scope**: one Sealmetrics site vs one GA4 property covering the same hostnames. - **Same metric family**: pageviews vs pageviews, conversions vs conversions. - **Closed periods**: compare finished days, not today-so-far. --- ## If the gap is still unexplained A sudden or very large deficit on the Sealmetrics side usually means hits are being lost before ingestion. Work through: 1. [GTM Consent Mode blocking](/troubleshooting/gtm-consent-mode-blocking) — the number one cause of "Sealmetrics suddenly shows less". 2. [CSP errors](/troubleshooting/csp-errors-domains-to-allow) — the tracker or its beacon blocked by policy. 3. [Unauthorized domain](/troubleshooting/unauthorized-domain) — part of your traffic served from a domain the site doesn't authorize. 4. [Reconciling with your ERP/CRM](/troubleshooting/erp-crm-database-discrepancy) — for conversion-count gaps specifically. --- ## Related - [GA4 vs Sealmetrics — Complete Comparison](/faq/ga4-vs-sealmetrics) - [How Sealmetrics Calculates Entrances](/reports/insights/how-sealmetrics-calculates-entrances) - [Bot Detection & Traffic Quality](/security-privacy/bot-detection) - [Data Discrepancy with Other Tools](/troubleshooting#data-discrepancy-with-other-tools) — the short version in the overview.