Estimating our Croct MAU from GA4 before picking a plan
Building the budget sheet before we commit to a plan. GA4 shows roughly 34k active users per month for us, fairly stable over the last two quarters.
Can I treat that as our Croct MAU one to one, or do the definitions diverge? I can imagine bots, consent banners, and where the measurement actually happens all pulling the numbers apart, but I dont know in which direction or by how much.
Would rather size the plan right the first time than get surprised either way.
1 answer
Close, but not one to one. Croct MAU means unique users who interact with the site in a month. Conceptually that is near GA4's monthly active users, but they are measured by different scripts at different points with different consent gating, so treat the GA4 figure as an estimate, not a mapping.
Direction-wise, the biggest systematic difference favors you: known bots do not count toward MAU on paid plans once bot filtering is enabled. Raw analytics counts usually include a bot share, so the Croct number typically lands below the GA4 number rather than above it.
For plan sizing at 34k: that is above Growth's included 20k MAU, so your realistic options are Growth with pay-as-you-go overage covering the difference, or a Scale quote if you would rather have the volume in the base plan. Extra volume is purchasable either way, it is not a hard wall, so the cost of estimating slightly wrong is an overage line item rather than an outage.
Practical suggestion: run a month on the free plan first. You get the actual MAU number from your real traffic, and the budget sheet gets a measured input instead of a converted one.
The measure-first suggestion is the answer I needed. One free month gives me a real number for the sheet. Marking accepted.