Analytics & Tracking

Start with a tracking audit before touching anything. The biggest risk in a broken GA4 setup is making changes that delete the partial data you do have. We audit every event, every conversion action, and every tag in GTM to map what's firing correctly, what's duplicating, and what's missing. In most accounts we find at least one conversion action counting inflated events, page views counted as leads, or the same purchase firing twice. We fix in order of revenue impact, not complexity.

GA4 is your analytics database, it collects user behavior across your site. Google Tag Manager is the container that fires tracking tags without touching site code. Google Ads conversion tracking is a separate signal that tells Google's bidding algorithm which clicks turned into valuable actions. All three can be running simultaneously and still be measuring completely different things. The most common error we find: Google Ads is optimizing to a conversion action that doesn't match what GA4 is recording as a lead. Smart Bidding then chases the wrong signal.

We build attribution in layers. First, GA4 assisted conversion reports to see full-path credit across channels. Second, UTM tagging standards enforced across every paid channel so CRM attribution is accurate. Third, for clients with sufficient conversion volume, we configure data-driven attribution in GA4 and Google Ads. For clients where that threshold isn't met, we use time-decay and document the tradeoffs. We've helped clients recover visibility into 3X more conversions simply by fixing the signal infrastructure.

A tracking audit takes 2 to 3 business days. Implementation depends on scope: fixing a GA4 event configuration and conversion action cleanup takes 1 to 2 weeks. A full server-side tracking setup with CAPI integration, CRM data layer, and custom event taxonomy takes 3 to 6 weeks. We scope it after the audit. We won't give you a timeline before we understand what's actually broken, fast estimates without an audit are how bad tracking setups get built.

Not if it's done correctly. Server-side tracking runs parallel to browser-side, you don't switch off the existing setup until the new one is verified. We use duplicate event detection and a staging environment to test every event before changing anything in production. The one risk is in deduplication: if browser-side and server-side both fire the same event to Meta or Google without deduplication keys, you'll overcount. We configure deduplication as standard on every server-side implementation.