“GA4 was set up by someone, sometime. Nobody trusts it.”
An analytics setup without ownership and maintenance stops getting used. Here is what is usually wrong underneath, and what a proper audit actually tells you.
A composite of engagements I have run, not a specific client. The details vary, but the patterns remain.
The setup nobody owns
GA4 was implemented in a hurry after the Universal Analytics sunset, and the agency is no longer engaged. No measurement plan, no documentation, and no one in the organization can confidently explain what any given event is supposed to represent.
The meeting stalls
Marketing reports 340 leads for the quarter. Sales counts 190 in the CRM. Internal systems are out of sync. Nobody can account for the difference, so the discussion moves on and the decision waits for a number everyone believes.
Everyone quietly stops looking
The dashboard stops influencing decisions. Budget gets allocated on instinct, and to whoever argues hardest, while a fully paid analytics stack keeps collecting inconsistent data.
What an audit usually finds.
These are the findings that come up again and again. Together they are why the numbers in two or more systems never agree, and why it is hard to say which one is right.
An illustrative findings list. Yours will differ in the detail — the categories rarely do.
Events that fire twice, or never.
A new event fires and the old event fires as well, so every purchase counts double. A lead event wired to a button that was renamed in a redesign, so it has not counted clicks for months.
Tracked events but not marked as conversions
The event exists and collects data, but was never upgraded as a conversion event.
Ad Blockers on the visitor’s browser
Website traffic isn’t measuring visitor actions consistently because ad blockers interfere with the analytics tracking code.
Broken cross-domain measurement
The checkout or booking flow sits on a second domain, linker configuration was never completed, and every crossing starts a new session with your own site as the referrer. Attribution scatters, and paid traffic gets filed under direct.
Unfiltered internal and bot traffic
Your own team, your agency, and automated uptime checks all counted as users. Small sites can be inflated substantially by staff traffic alone.
PII where it should not be
Email addresses in query strings flowing into page_location. This is a compliance exposure and a Google policy violation, not merely untidy data.
Default data retention
Left at the two-month default, so any year-over-year question is unanswerable. The data is gone forever.
What the audit actually does.
An audit tool can produce a list of possible issues. That is not the hard part. The hard part is deciding which ones matter to your business, which are valid problems, and in what order.
- ◆A written report in plain English, not a tool export
- ◆Every finding with a severity and a business cost
- ◆A prioritized fix list and a smarter measurement plan
- ◆Full implementation support
The same month, measured properly.
The audit is not the point. The decision is.
The goal of this exercise is achieved when we agree that we are comfortable making decisions based on this report. That is why the findings are ordered by business impact rather than by technical severity.
Read access to GA4 and Google Tag Manager to begin, plus the ability to view your site as a normal visitor. For the reconciliation step, it helps to have read access to your CRM or billing reports, or simply exports of them. I never need write access unless you engage me for the remediation.
The audit usually takes one to two weeks from when you grant access to the report landing page. Larger setups with several domains, multiple containers, or an ecommerce implementation take longer, and I will say so before we start rather than after. The implementation can run into a few weeks or months.
Either. The audit is deliberately offered as a standalone piece so you don’t commit to an implementation before you know the scale of the problem. If you want me to carry out the fixes, we quote that separately once we both know what is involved.
Then you have something genuinely valuable and the confidence to trust your numbers.
Automated tools are part of the process, and they are good at finding symptoms such as missing tags, duplicate hits, and console errors. What they cannot do is know that your business counts a lead differently from your CRM, or that the event nobody thought to build is the one your board asks about every quarter. That judgment is the deliverable.
Sound like your setup?
That is usually where we start. Thirty minutes, no obligation — and you leave knowing whether this is your problem or something else entirely.
Book a free 30-minute call