Device Wiko K-KOOL appearing on Google Analytics (UA)
For the latest months (April/23 ~ May/23 and counting) I’m noticing more and more the device “Wiko K-KOOL” appearing on Google Analytics (Universal) reports and I didn’t find a definitive explanation about it so I’ll share here the information my team from work gathered up until now.
Are those devices bots or people?
This was the first thing that popped up in my mind, and I believe everyone else’s. We filtered only devices outside of Brazil (where I’m from), but got very few results. Throughout the process we found that those devices got to purchase products on the site of the company I work on, but there wasn’t much of a pattern through all those devices I could grasp to claim those were bots.
They only appear on GA Universal
We all know GA4 is coming to substitute UA, so we did as recommended and dual tracked all our UA properties to count on GA4 too. Searching for this device on the equivalent GA4 property we didn’t find any.
Using the data exported to BigQuery from both properties we joined the tables using clientId (UA) and user_pseudo_id (GA4) as keys. The results revealed that all those appearing as Wiko K-KOOL devices on UA seems to translate to other devices on GA4:
Just to make sure, we connected the tables using the transactionIds from the devices that bought something and the output was the same.
They only appear on websites, not on apps
For some reason they don’t appear on mobile apps, which increased the probability that those weren’t real devices.
They only appear on Google Chrome
When adding “Browser” as a Secondary Dimension on a GA report, we noticed that 100% of those devices used Chrome. No exception.
Googling it, we found a post on Reddit about this case where the user u/holakita mentioned a blog post (from the official Chrome blog) about the Chrome update to version 110. On this version, Chrome modifies parts of the User Agent on the HTTP Request to fixed values, to help user anonymity probably. Here are some prints from the post:
After days of analysis and no conclusion I revisited that official post and I paid more attention to the word “fixed”. If we take the image above as a definition, this means that Android Version will be fixed to 10 and Device Brand will be fixed to “K”.
But wait, there’s no device named “K”, right?
Manual Test on Google Analytics
We decided to see what happens when we send a hit to GA with that fixed User Agent.
I prepared a blank GA (UA) property for this test to make sure there wasn’t any other hits to misguide me. After that, I sent a hit with the modified User Agent using Chrome Dev Tools. The one I used was this one:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
And voila! There is the device:
Our guess is that GA is translating the “K” in the User Agent to the first device that starts with K in it’s database. Just a wild guess. What do you guys think?
Conclusion
TL;DR: Chrome version 110+ modifies User Agent to fixed values. Google Analytics interprets those as Wiko K-KOOL devices.
The information we gathered about Wiko K-KOOL:
- not bots (necessarily)
- translates to other brand devices if you see on GA4
- impacts only Android users using Chrome v110+
That’s all guys! If you know any more information about it that you think could help someone, comment it! We’ll appreciate it.
UPDATE [04/Aug]
I wouldn’t imagine the repercussion of this article! Overjoyed our frustration at least helped some also frustrated souls too.
So here is the update: our team contacted Google through a partner company, sharing all the details presented in this article, and after a couple of months they confirmed the problem was indeed caused by the User-Agent. Without knowing the details, we can only guess it was like described here.
They FIXED the issue!
Checking the Google Analytics reports, we confirm the device Wiko K-KOOL definitely disappearing from the charts the day 26/July/2023:
I don’t know if it replicates the same for everybody, so you’ll probably have to check for yourself to be sure.
Important note: Google informed us the data already processed will NOT be corrected, and only the data AFTER their update will be changed to the right devices.
So, whenever you have to check historical data from Google Analytics (Universal) keep in mind the period mainly between April/23* until July/23 will be flooded with Wiko K-KOOL. (*started way before April, but the numbers were less relevant)
