GA4 Organic Traffic Switched to Direct Traffic

[MrHusky]

Hey everyone!

First of all, thank you for the opportunity to join the forum!

We have a local client (US) at the agency (Using WP, Hosted on WP Engine, Using Succuri, WP Rocket), where most of the traffic in GA4 is attributed to Direct. Previously the team have moved from UA to GA4 and that is when the issue started happening.

Here is a screenshot, where you can see that Organic Search dropped and it switched over to Direct Traffic.

The team also created another GA4 property to test and the issue remained the same.

The GA4 Tag is implemented properly through GTM, although GTM shows a message regarding Cookie Consent. We don't currently have a Cookie Consent Pop-up at all, could that be causing this issue?

I have checked the following several times from several IPs:

1. Search the clients name on Google
2. Switched to the Network Tab on Chrome
3. Looked at the Request Headers of the main document to check Referrer (it's usually showing the domain, like Referrer: domain.com - and sometimes Google)-
4. Looked at the Payload of the actual GA JS (collect?v=......) and the dr (document referrer) shows Google (sometimes it doesnt)-

However, even when the Referrer and dr shows Google, it still doesn't get attributed as Organic Search in GA4. Sometimes it doesn't even register the visit. When browsing in Tag Assistant and GA4 Debug View, everything seems to be working fine, tags are firing,

What I suspect:

1. Maybe there is a redirect happening before the page load, which rewrites the referrer to be the domain, instead of the actual referrer?
2. Maybe it's a cache or Sucuri issue?
3. Could it be a Cookie Consent Issue? (We don't have any plugin installed for that at the moment).

We have contacted Google Support, their response was the following:

The thing is, we do have document refferer in the HTTP header.

Did you guys ever encounter an issue like this?

If anyone has any tips, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance!

 

[JoyHawkins]

This sounds like a good question for @danaditomaso

 

[danaditomaso]

Someone has done something to your GA4 tag to remove the referrer parameter from being sent to GA4 properly. Is GA4 served via Google Tag Manager? Or is it directly on the site? And can you share the URL?

 

[MrHusky]

Hey @danaditomaso!

Absolutely! Let me send you the URL via DM. The GA4 Tag is served via GTM!

Thank you very much!