You open Google Analytics 4, stare at the reports, and wonder if any of it is actually true. Are these numbers real? Is your marketing working? Should you trust this data to make budget decisions?
For many business owners and marketers, GA4 has become less a tool for clarity and more a source of anxiety. The platform’s complexity leaves teams feeling like they’re flying blind, forced to make critical decisions based on data they don’t trust. This guide provides six critical questions you can answer in 10 minutes to diagnose the most common issues corrupting your data (no technical expertise required).
Table of Contents
From Data Doubt to Decision-Making
You know the feeling. You open Google Analytics 4, stare at the reports, and wonder if any of it is actually true.
Are these numbers real? Is my marketing working? Should I trust this data to make budget decisions?
For many business owners and marketers, GA4 has become less a tool for clarity and more a source of anxiety. The platform’s complexity leaves teams feeling like they’re flying blind, forced to make critical decisions based on data they don’t trust.
If phrases like “I’m overwhelmed by the data” or “I can’t prove my marketing ROI” sound familiar, you’re not alone. This frustration isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a symptom of a tool that requires significant configuration to provide real value.
But taking back control doesn’t have to be an overwhelming, multi-week project.
It can start right now, in the next 10 minutes.
This guide provides a simple, six-question health check that any business owner can perform, regardless of technical expertise. Think of it as a first-aid check for your analytics account. It won’t fix every problem, but it will tell you if there’s a serious injury that needs immediate attention.
By answering these six questions, you can move from a state of data doubt to one of empowered, informed decision-making.
The 6 Critical Questions for Your GA4 Account
These checks are prioritised for maximum impact, starting with the most fundamental question of all.
Question 1: Is Anyone Home? Verifying Your Data is Flowing
Before analysing any report, you need to confirm that GA4 is actually receiving data from your website. If the data pipeline is broken, every other report will be empty and useless.
This is the most basic check, like checking for a dial tone before making a call.
How to check:
Navigate to the Reports section using the left-hand menu in Google Analytics. Click on Realtime.
The Realtime overview should show a map with user locations and cards displaying Users in last 30 minutes. If your website has any visitors right now, this number should be greater than zero.
If this report shows zero users and you know your website has traffic, it’s a strong indicator that the main GA4 tracking code is either broken or missing from key pages of your site.
Why this matters:
Without this foundational tracking, no data can be collected. Every other check becomes irrelevant if data isn’t flowing in the first place.
Question 2: Are You Measuring What Actually Matters? Checking Your Key Events
GA4 records almost every user interaction as an event: a page view, a scroll, a click. However, GA4 doesn’t inherently know which of these events are important to your business.
An action only becomes a conversion for reporting and optimisation purposes when it’s explicitly marked as a key event. Failing to do this is like tracking every person who walks past your shop but never counting who actually comes inside to buy something.
How to check:
Navigate to the Admin section by clicking the gear icon in the bottom-left corner. Under the Property column, go to Data display > Events.
This page lists all events GA4 is collecting. Look for events that represent your business goals, such as form_submission, newsletter_signup, or purchase.
To the right of each event name is a toggle switch under the column Mark as key event. Ensure this toggle is switched on for every event that signifies a conversion.
Why this matters:
If your business tracks leads via a form, but the form_submission event isn’t marked as a key event, your conversion reports will show zero leads even if thousands are being collected. The data exists, but GA4 doesn’t know it’s important.
Question 3: Can You See Your Marketing ROI? Checking for Campaign Tags
To understand which marketing efforts are working, you need to tell GA4 where your traffic is coming from. Without proper tracking, traffic from email campaigns, social media posts, and affiliate links gets lumped into generic buckets like Direct or Referral, making it impossible to measure ROI.
This is achieved using UTM parameters, small snippets of code added to your links that act like name tags for your marketing.
How to check:
Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
The primary dimension in the table is Session default channel group. Click the dropdown arrow and change it to Session campaign.
This report should show the names of your marketing campaigns (for example, summer_sale_2025 or june_newsletter).
If this report is mostly empty or shows (not set), it means your campaign links aren’t being properly tagged with UTM parameters.
Why this matters:
Without this visibility, it’s impossible to know whether your budget for a Facebook campaign is driving sales or if the time spent on your email newsletter is paying off. You’re essentially marketing blind.
Important: If you’re running Google Ads or care about organic search traffic, ensure Google Ads and Google Search Console are linked to your GA4 property. These integrations automatically pull in paid and organic search data without requiring manual UTM tagging.
Question 4: Is Your Revenue Real? Checking E-commerce Tracking
For any e-commerce business, this is the bottom line. The accuracy of your revenue reporting in GA4 is non-negotiable. If these numbers are wrong, every decision about ad spend, promotions, and product strategy could be based on flawed data.
How to check:
Go to Reports > Monetisation > Ecommerce purchases.
This report should show a list of products sold, along with metrics like Items purchased and Item revenue.
If this report is empty, or if it shows transactions but zero revenue, your e-commerce tracking is broken.
Critical check for inflated revenue:
Click the blue + icon above the table to add a secondary dimension and select Transaction ID.
If any single Transaction ID appears in the report more than once, it means duplicate transactions are being recorded. This dangerously inflates your revenue and return on ad spend metrics.
Why this matters:
An empty e-commerce report means you have no visibility on what’s selling. A report with duplicated revenue is even more dangerous, as it can lead to over-investing in campaigns that appear far more profitable than they actually are.
Question 5: Are You Using GA4’s Freebies? Activating Enhanced Measurement
GA4 has a powerful feature called Enhanced Measurement that can automatically track several important user interactions without any coding required. This includes actions like scrolling down a page, clicking links to other websites, downloading files, and watching embedded YouTube videos.
This is essentially free data that many businesses aren’t collecting.
How to check:
Navigate to Admin > Data Streams (under the Property column). Click on the web data stream for your website.
In the Events section, look for Enhanced measurement. Ensure the toggle is switched on.
Click the gear icon to the right to see exactly which interactions are being automatically tracked. By default, these include:
- Page views
- Scrolls (when users scroll to the bottom of a page)
- Outbound clicks (links to other websites)
- Site search (if your site has a search function)
- Video engagement (for embedded YouTube videos)
- File downloads
Why this matters:
Failing to enable this feature means missing out on a rich layer of behavioural data that can help you understand how users engage with your content, all available out of the box.
Question 6: Will Your Data Disappear? The Critical 14-Month Data Retention Check
This is arguably the most critical and often-missed setting in GA4. By default, GA4 automatically and permanently deletes detailed, user-level data after only two months.
This makes it impossible to perform year-over-year analysis, compare seasonal trends, or analyse the behaviour of users who visited more than 60 days ago.
How to check:
Navigate to Admin > Data Settings (under the Property column). Click on Data Retention.
Look at the Event data retention setting. If it’s set to 2 months, it needs to be changed immediately.
Select 14 months from the dropdown menu and click Save.
Important: This change is not retroactive. It cannot recover data that has already been deleted. Leaving this setting at the two-month default cripples your ability to conduct long-term strategic analysis, effectively putting an expiration date on your business insights.
Why this matters:
Imagine wanting to compare this December’s sales to last December’s, only to discover that all the detailed data from last year has been permanently deleted. This setting determines whether you can do that kind of analysis or not.
Next Steps
Fix What You Found
Your audit revealed specific issues. Address them systematically:
If Data Isn’t Flowing (Question 1): Your GA4 tracking code is broken or missing. Check if Google Tag Manager is installed correctly and your GA4 tag is firing on all pages. Visit How to Install Google Tag Manager and Install Google Analytics 4 on Website to rebuild your foundation properly.
If Key Events Aren’t Marked (Question 2): Go to Admin > Events in GA4 and toggle on “Mark as key event” for conversions that matter—purchases, form submissions, signups. This immediately enables conversion reporting and allows Google Ads to optimize for these actions.
If Campaign Attribution Is Missing (Question 3): Start using UTM parameters on all marketing links. Create a consistent naming convention for campaigns and apply it to email links, social media posts, and affiliate partnerships. Read our UTM Parameters Guide to implement proper attribution tracking.
If E-commerce Tracking Is Broken (Question 4): You need enhanced e-commerce implementation. This requires configuring your platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, custom site) to send purchase data to GA4 with transaction IDs, product details, and revenue values. Duplicate transaction tracking is particularly critical—it inflates revenue reports and leads to catastrophic budget decisions.
If Enhanced Measurement Is Off (Question 5): Enable it immediately in Admin > Data Streams > Enhanced Measurement. This activates free tracking for scrolls, outbound clicks, video engagement, and file downloads without any code changes.
If Data Retention Is 2 Months (Question 6): Change it to 14 months immediately in Admin > Data Retention. This change only affects future data—already-deleted data cannot be recovered. Do this now before you lose more historical information.
Understanding the Complete Measurement System
This audit revealed configuration issues within GA4, but GA4 is one component of a complete measurement infrastructure. Proper tracking requires Google Tag Manager for deployment, the data layer for structured event tracking, UTM parameters for attribution, conversion tracking across platforms, and consent mode for privacy compliance. When one component is misconfigured, the entire system produces unreliable data.
How to Build Your Marketing Measurement Foundation shows you how to implement each component correctly from the start, preventing the configuration issues this audit uncovered and ensuring your data is reliable, complete, and actionable.
If You Need Help
Fixing GA4 configuration issues requires understanding event tracking, conversion setup, e-commerce implementation, and cross-platform integration. Our Marketing Measurement Foundation service provides complete GA4 implementation with proper event architecture and conversion tracking if you prefer expert setup.
Conclusion
By asking these six questions, you now have a clearer picture of your GA4 account’s health. You’ve identified potential issues that could be undermining your data’s reliability.
This quick diagnosis has likely revealed what might be broken.
However, these checks are just the beginning. There are dozens of other settings and configurations that can corrupt your data: filters that accidentally exclude traffic, bot filtering that’s turned off, cross-domain tracking that’s misconfigured, consent mode that’s blocking legitimate data, and attribution settings that are misaligned with your business model.
Each of these can silently distort your reports, leading to poor decisions and wasted budget.
Understanding how to fix the issues you’ve identified today, and discovering the other potential problems lurking in your setup, requires a more comprehensive approach. But you’ve taken the first step: knowing what questions to ask.
That’s where real clarity begins.