Why Is My Mobile Traffic Marked as "Desktop" in GA4?

Any time you're making decisions about what you need to do for your website, you need to have data behind those decisions. Analytics are extremely important in harvesting that data, but what happens when the analytics go wrong? If you can't trust your data, you can't make accurate choices.

One problem I see occasionally is an issue in Google Analytics 4, or GA4, which is Google's latest iteration of their analytics platform. Some users find that while their traffic numbers seem accurate, the device attribution is not. All, or most, of their mobile traffic is attributed as desktop traffic instead.

While this might not seem like a huge issue, it can have cascading issues. When you don't know what proportion of your traffic comes from mobile, you don't know how much you should focus on mobile design and content. When you can't segment your audiences, you can't tell if mobile users are running into roadblocks or following channels through your site that you need to tailor.

This issue has been around for a while, but it's a bit of a mystery. There are all sorts of support threads on Google's help center and on Reddit where people have the issue, but in typical support thread fashion, the original poster never returns with a solution, and the threads just fizzle out.

What is your average website owner supposed to do when you find a thread where 145 people have said, "Yeah, I have this issue too," but no one responds?

Some people give up, some people poke at settings until they find something that fixes the problem, and some people even switch to other analytics platforms. Me, I like to go digging, so let's see what I can turn up.

Granular Location and Device Data Collection

The first and most likely culprit is a sneaky setting buried in the data settings of Google Analytics.

What is the setting, and what does it do? First of all, it's a simple toggle, on or off. Google's description is:

"When you activate granular location and device data collection, Analytics collects metadata about the city-level location and granular device details of your site and app visitors so it can provide location and device-based capabilities. Region and country-level metadata is collected by default for all of your traffic in order to support regional privacy policies and region-based Analytics settings."

You're able to toggle this setting on and off in its entirety, or you can use the granular control it offers to disable or enable it selectively across 307 regions. These regions are all of the countries of the world, specific regions like the U.S. Outlying Islands, and individual U.S. states.

The main purpose of this setting is to customize what countries you're tracking specific data about versus which ones you're not. It's a way to manage tracking without relying entirely on user consent; in countries or states with stricter privacy laws, you can reduce the amount of tracking that goes on.

For whatever reason, it seems like Google decided to lump device data into this setting, even though it sounds at first glance like it's entirely based on geographic tracking.

Indeed, from a few threads I've found, it seems like when this setting is disabled, device tracking can break on mobile devices, and the traffic reports as desktop. I haven't been able to confirm this, but if you're having the issue and you check the setting and find it disabled, let me know in the comments. I'd love verification.

To find this setting, log into your Google Analytics account and select your website's property. Then, at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, click on the Admin dashboard. On this page of settings, in the list of categories on the left, expand Data Collection and Modification, and click on Data Collection. The Granular Location and Device Data Collection setting will be near the bottom.

While this seems to be the problem for some people, others report that they have the setting enabled and still have misrepresented device data, so that can't be the only cause. What else is there?

Improper Filtering on Traffic in GA4

One thing you might want to check is whether or not the traffic reports you're looking at are filtering some of your traffic.

It sounds dumb, but even I've run into this before and had a moment of panic before I realized what was going on. What happens is you set a filter or a report to look at just your desktop data. Maybe you're troubleshooting, maybe you're digging into specific user journeys, whatever. When you're done, you move on with whatever you were doing.

Later, when you go back, you glance at your traffic reports and find that you have no mobile traffic. Panic!

Normally, you might think your mobile site is broken, or your tracking isn't working, but maybe you've heard of the issue of misattributed traffic before (you're here, after all), so it's the first thing that comes to mind.

The potentially more insidious option is improperly configured data filtering.

Google Analytics is set up to proactively filter certain kinds of traffic to avoid having your analytics corrupted. Things like search engine crawlers, indexation bots like those from Ahrefs or Moz, and any of the legions of other kinds of known bots out there can all be identified and filtered using aggregated information Google knows.

That way, you don't get inflated view counts, deflated conversion rates, spiked bounce rates, or other issues from traffic that was never human in the first place. Google can also proactively filter internal traffic so you don't mess with your own metrics while you're digging around your own site.

The issue might come if you were trying to filter, say, developers or internal users who were testing your mobile site. If you accidentally filtered all mobile traffic, well, there's your problem.

To find this setting and check your filters, log into your Google Analytics account and select your website's property. Then, at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, click on the Admin dashboard. On this page of settings, in the list of categories on the left, expand Data Collection and Modification, and click on Data Filters.

Here, you can see the filters currently in place and what status they have.

• Inactive: The filter isn't doing anything.
• Active: The filter is excluding the data it is set to exclude.
• Testing: The filter exists and is flagging data it would filter, but the data is still being harvested.

If you have an active filter that is filtering mobile traffic, that could be causing your problem. You might even have it filtering specific kinds of mobile traffic, like certain devices or user agents, like you filtered them because of a spam or DDoS attack.

The bad news is that even if you turn off this filter, the data lost along the way can't be recovered. A filter set to active means Google just doesn't retain that data, so it's gone. A testing filter means the data exists and can be looked at using the filter name dimension, so that's a better outcome.

Google Tag Manager Filtering Rules

A similar filtering issue comes not from GA4 itself but from the use of the Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager is meant to be a secondary tool that allows you easy access and control over a lot of useful event tracking in a way that minimizes how much you need to go in and manually insert tracking code throughout your site.

GTM is very convenient and somewhat automatic, but it can still get things wrong if you misconfigure something along the way.

There are a few ways using the Google Tag Manager can go wrong.

One thing that might have happened if you have different versions of your site for desktop and mobile is using different tags for each of them. Usually, you want one tag ID for your whole domain, which can then be used as a reference for reports down the line. If you try to set up different tags, they might conflict, or you might only get reports for one of them. If your desktop tag takes priority, mobile traffic triggers that tag and is reported as desktop traffic.

You can also install filters in the Google Tag Manager. Google even allows you to do simple device category filters, which is what you should do instead of having multiple tags, but if you have the wrong filter in place, it can cause problems with your reported data.

This post on Stack Overflow may be almost a decade old, but it tells you basically what I'm talking about. If you've used Google Tag Manager before, check your settings and filters there, or check how you're pulling the reports in GA4 from GTM.

You can read all about how to install and use GTM properly in this guide.

Mobile Analytics is Broken or Misconfigured

Another issue you might have is that the analytics on your mobile site are not functioning properly. All sorts of things can happen:

• Installing more than one copy of the Analytics code accidentally.
• A broken installation of Google Analytics.
• A responsive design that unloads the tracking scripts on smaller viewport sizes.
• A mobile subdomain that doesn't have the tracking code installed.

A lot of these end up giving you conflicts that can miscount or double-count traffic or just not count it properly at all.

This is more likely to be the case if you have zero recorded mobile device traffic rather than having some mobile traffic and a lot that has been misattributed.

I saw this kind of issue a lot when Google first switched away from Universal Analytics and to GA4. People who made the switch manually occasionally did something wrong (or a plugin managing Google Analytics for them did it wrong) and ended up with a broken installation. Since that transition was a couple of years ago now, a lot of people have sorted it out. But UA finally stopped working in the middle of last year, and people who don't check their analytics constantly might not have noticed an issue with the transition until recently.

There are a handful of ways you can check and validate your GA4 installation. Make sure to validate both your desktop and your mobile site as necessary when you do.

Alternative Solutions

Unfortunately, most of these solutions are focused on mobile traffic simply not appearing in analytics rather than being truly misattributed. As I mentioned at the start, there's very little information about what actually causes the problem, and given that I don't have it on my sites myself, it's hard for me to go digging directly without jeopardizing my own analytics data to do so.

That said, if you have a site having this issue, let me know! If any of these issues are the solution, I'd love to hear it, and if not, I don't mind doing some poking around to see if I can figure out what's actually going on.

Do you have any additional questions about anything I went over in this article, or would you like me to go into more detail about a specific section or two? If so, I'm always more than happy to help however I can, so be sure to leave me a comment down below, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!

And if you're looking for any further information, be sure to check out my other blog posts! I've been writing weekly blog posts for multiple years now, so there is a plethora of information available to you, completely for free. You're bound to find an article useful to your particular needs. If I haven't written about the specific topic you're looking for, leave me a comment in the comments section, and I'll look into it! If it's a topic that is requested enough, I'd be up for writing an article on it! But I have to hear from you all before I can do that!