AppsFlyer GoogleTagManager Integration - different number of events

In our app, we use Google Tag Manager to send in-app events to both Firebase and AppsFlyer. When we test it locally it works correctly in logs I can see that GTM saves Tag

GoogleTagManager info: Saved tag for URL https://api2.appsflyer.com/inappevent/idxxxxxxxx

then after a while, GTM sends it

GoogleTagManager info: Sent hit https://api2.appsflyer.com/inappevent/idxxxxxxxx

I check with Charles how the request looks like and everything looks good the payload is built correctly and I get 200 OK.

{
    "appsflyer_id": "XXXXX",
    "eventName": "af_initiated_checkout",
    "af_events_api": "true",
    "eventValue": "{\"af_price\":500,\"af_content_id\":\"x1\",\"af_content_type\":\"xxx\",\"af_currency\":\"EUR\",\"af_quantity\":8}",
    "idfa": "XXXX-XXXX-XXXX",
    "bundle_id": "com.superapp.superapp"
}

After a few minutes, I can see the effect on the AppsFlyer dashboard. but when we sent the app to the production (the same bundle id) we spotted that count of events is quite different between Firebase and AppsFlyer even 10 times more events in Firebase in some cases. What can be the cause of that? How I can debug this problem?

Solution

Here is Luc from AppsFlyer Support, From your description, my guess is the following:

AppsFlyer dashboard is based on install date and shows life-time data, meaning that if you look at "last week", you see the data of user who installed your app last week. The number of events that GTM sent to AppsFlyer last week is likely much higher than events generated by installs of last week, since most of them correspond to older installs.

The only page of our dashboard which follows a different logic is the "Activity" page, which is based on event date. Could you compare the event number in GTM with the number of events in the Activity Page?

If that doesn't solve the problem, simply shoot an email to [email protected] with more details and the app_id, I'll have a look.

thanks and best, Luc