I thought I had 1,087 visitors and 26 leads. 41% were bots and 23 leads were one bot.
I run projectcostestimator.com , a free website-cost calculator with a 9-engine pricing model and an open CC BY 4.0 dataset. This week I sat down to figure out why a site with "decent" traffic was making $0 — and found out most of my dashboard was fiction. Here's exactly how, with the queries, because you probably have the same problem and don't know it. The numbers I believed GA4 said 1,087…
Projectcostestimator.com, a free website-cost calculator, experienced a revelation after discovering that much of its dashboard data was fictional. The site's analytics showed 1,087 sessions in 28 days, but the lead table indicated only 26 captured leads. The discrepancy between Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC) prompted an investigation.
It was discovered that 41% of all GA4 sessions came from a single Chrome-on-MacOS fingerprint, which turned out to be a bot with a residential-IP pool. Upon excluding this traffic slice, GA4's session count matched GSC's, revealing that the bot was responsible for most of the false leads. The author implemented a strict lead counter, a daily reconciliation guard, and blocked the abusive API-key endpoint to prevent further issues.
The key takeaway is that website analytics numbers should not be considered business metrics until identity has been validated.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
