The other day, after completing three audits in a week, I started wondering what recommendations I was making the most.
I’ve have done about 20 full audits of Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager at the time of writing this (update, it's a lot more now, but these issues STILL remain in most accounts). And at this point, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what I'm gonna find.
So, I took to my trusty notebook, looked through all of my audits, and collected some data.
(Very professionally with my shit handwriting and tally marks, of course.)
Finally the verdict was in... And my gut was right.
The Most Common issues in GA4
❌ Misconfigured Custom GA4 Events (81% of all accounts)
❌ Missing Call Tracking (75% of all accounts)
❌ Misconfigured GTM Events (62.5% of all accounts)
❌ Unregistered Parameters (56.25% of all accounts)
❌ Data Retention settings not updated (50% of all accounts)
But remember, these aren't the ONLY things I'm seeing mess up data! I'm seeing quite a few issues show up time and time again. So, lets chat through them.
Misconfigured Property Settings ⚙️
Cross-domain tracking
The biggest culprit here are subdomains for landing pages OR apps where the tag never got placed.
Data retention
By default, data retention is set to 2 months and most folks can change this to 14 months. This affects the data you can access in Explore.
unRegistered parameters
That extra data you send with your Google Tag Manager events? Collected in GA4… but not retained unless you register them. Most people forget this step.
Audiences
Soooo many audiences. & so many of them are duplicated or setup incorrectly or just downright misused. 😅 Lol
I cover most of these "settings" issues in this video. It's a bit old, but still covers everything.
PS - Not too sure about your property setup? Peep my free checklist
Mishandled Event tracking 🔢
Misconfigured Custom GA4 events
GA4 has an event creator in it which is SICK! But for it to be effective, you have to understand the data structure.
Duplicate Enhanced Measurement events
Enhanced Measurement is turned on by default and it collects a lot, but most people don’t know what all it collects and will create their own versions of these events.
no Call tracking set
Almost every site has a phone number on it for you to call. But it’s almost so obvious to track, that it gets overlooked.
No marked conversions (or key events)
Turning on conversions happens in the events section of GA4. Some people don’t know this and others don’t care. But without conversions set, you don’t get access to any of the functionalities of the Advertising section of GA4.
no Video tracking
Video tracking can be done with Enhanced Measurement, but it requires the YouTube videos have to have JS API support enabled. This tends to get overlooked.
issues with Tag Manager tags 🏷️
Duplicate events
Much like Google Analytics, Tag Manager is a platform that gets shared throughout many teams. Sometimes there will be tags named different things that use the same triggers.
Misconfigured events
This happens for a few different reasons, but most of the time it’s due to changes that happen on the site over time.
All I'm saying is, double-check your setup. Go through the basics - events, tags, properties. Make sure everything is actually doing what you think it's doing. Save yourself a headache down the road.
Remember: The fundamentals are fundamental.
Thanks for sticking around ❤️
As always, if you need help with anything covered in this post, PLEASE reach out!
PS - This was taken almost exactly from an old email newsletter. Wanna see this kind of content while it's fresh??? Get on the list!
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