Quick Audit and Common Problems

Quick audit and common problems

Use this chapter as a standalone reference. The 30-minute checklist catches the problems that do most damage to report credibility. The common problems table shows the patterns that appear most often in inherited accounts.

6 min read · Agency · Intermediate

The 30-minute account health check

Use this when you first access a new account, or before presenting data to a client. It won't catch everything, but it will catch the problems that do the most damage to a report's credibility.

Common inherited account problems

These are the patterns that come up most often when taking over an account someone else configured, or when auditing an account that's been running on autopilot.

Problem	How it appears	Root cause	Fix
Conversion rate looks too high	Conversion rate of 15-25% on what should be a 2-3% site	Internal traffic not filtered; team's own visits are counted with a much higher conversion rate	Activate internal traffic filter; recalculate baselines after 2-4 weeks of clean data
"Direct" is the top channel	30-50% of sessions attributed to Direct, even for a site with active paid campaigns	UTM parameters missing from email campaigns and paid social; some traffic losing attribution mid-session	Audit all campaign URLs for UTM coverage; add referral exclusions if attribution breaks mid-session
Conversion count doubles on checkout	More conversions than orders in the payment system	Payment gateway redirect creates a new session; purchase event fires twice (on return from gateway and again on a thank-you page reload)	Add referral exclusion for the payment gateway; deduplicate the purchase trigger in GTM using a dataLayer flag
Dozens of key events marked	20+ events all marked as conversions; conversion count in reports is enormous	Previous analyst marked everything as a conversion "to track it better"	Unmark all but the 3-5 that represent real business outcomes; use standard event tracking for the rest
No data beyond 2 months in Explorations	Exploration reports return no data for date ranges older than 60 days	Data retention was never changed from the 2-month default	Change to 14 months now — but historical data already aged out cannot be recovered
camelCase and snake_case events mixed	Both `formSubmit` and `form_submit` appearing in the event list	Multiple developers or tools (GTM, GA4 auto-events, hardcoded tags) creating events independently	Standardise on snake_case; consolidate in GTM; remove duplicate tags
Staging traffic mixed with production	Low-traffic pages appearing with disproportionately high engagement; staging hostnames visible	The same GA4 tag is loaded on the staging or development environment	Use a GTM environment variable to fire a different Measurement ID on staging, or block the tag on non-production hostnames

The best time to audit a GA4 account is before you use its data to make a decision. The second best time is right now.

In Clearly

Once the account is clean — internal traffic filtered, conversions correctly marked, channels grouping properly — the next job is reporting. GA4's own reports are granular but not presentation-ready, and exporting to a spreadsheet every month is how reporting becomes a two-hour job instead of a 20-minute one.

Clearly connects to GA4 and turns the data into a live, shareable report your client can open without a GA4 login. The same channel groupings, the same key events, the same date comparisons you've set up in GA4 — surfaced in a format a non-analyst can read. When the underlying GA4 account is set up properly, the report builds itself. The audit is the work; the report is the result.

The 30-minute account health check

Common inherited account problems

In Clearly

Naming Conventions for GA4 Events

Recommended vs Custom Events: Which to Use

How to Choose Your GA4 Key Events

Event-Scoped vs User-Scoped Custom Dimensions

Filter Internal Traffic Out of GA4

GA4 Default Channel Groupings, Explained

Content Grouping in GA4

GA4 Sampling and Thresholds