Google Analytics audit

Why audit Google Analytics at all

Every decision about marketing spend rests on data. If GA4 says Google Ads brought 40 leads last month and the real number was 12, you'll keep paying for a campaign that doesn't work. If phone calls aren't tracked, the channel that actually fills your calendar may look like a failure. A Google Analytics audit is a cheap way to make sure the next budget decision is based on something real.

Most setups I review weren't built badly on purpose. They grew in layers: a developer added the tag during the build, an agency added conversions, someone installed a plugin, the switch from Universal Analytics to GA4 left things half-migrated. Nobody ever checked the whole picture.

The most common findings

These come up again and again in small business setups:

• Double tracking. GA4 installed both directly in the site code and through Tag Manager, so every visit and event counts twice.
• Conversions on page views. A "thank you" page counted as a lead, so refreshes, bookmarks and accidental visits become leads too.
• Forms that don't fire. Modern forms often submit without loading a new page, and the tag never notices.
• Phone clicks untracked. On mobile, tapping the number is the main action, yet it isn't recorded.
• Wrong currency or time zone. Revenue in US dollars, days split at midnight UTC rather than your local time.
• No internal traffic filter. Your staff's visits inflate traffic and sometimes conversions.
• Tags firing before consent. A privacy problem under PIPEDA and especially Quebec's Law 25.

Each issue is small. Together they make the reports meaningless.

How I test

Reading settings isn't enough. I test the setup the way a customer uses the site: submitting each form, tapping phone numbers and email links, starting a booking, adding to cart where relevant, accepting and rejecting cookies. While doing that I watch Tag Manager's preview mode, GA4's debug view and the ad platforms' diagnostic tools to see what fires, when and with what data.

Then I compare totals. Conversions recorded in GA4, Google Ads and Meta over the last month are set against your actual leads or sales. The gaps show where the setup over- or under-counts, which is often the most useful single finding of the audit.

Consent and privacy

Part of every audit is checking that tracking respects consent. With a banner in place, tags should wait for the visitor's choice or, with Consent Mode, adjust what they send. I often find banners that look correct but don't actually block anything. For businesses serving Quebec, where Law 25 requires tracking that identifies or profiles people to be off by default, that's a real risk. The fix is covered on the Consent Mode v2 page.

What you get

A written document listing every issue, its effect on your data and the fix, in priority order. Then a Zoom call to go through it. If the setup is salvageable, the fixes are usually quick. If it's a tangle of old tags and half-migrated settings, a clean GA4 and Tag Manager setup for $650 is often cheaper than repairing it piece by piece.

Audit before you scale ads

If you're about to raise your ad budget, audit first. Google Ads and Meta both use conversion data to decide whom to show ads to. Feed them wrong data and they'll optimize for the wrong people, at a larger scale. For a guide to the reports worth reading once the data is clean, see GA4 for small business owners. If you also want the campaigns themselves reviewed, that's a separate Google Ads audit.