A practical, plain-English checklist for auditing a Google Analytics 4 setup. Fourteen checks across installation, consent, data quality, conversions and Google Tag Manager governance — what each one means, and why it matters. Work through it by hand, or run it automatically in two minutes.
Want this checklist run against your real GA4 and GTM, scored A–F? Your first audit is free.
Run a free audit →Confirm the GA4 tag (or the GTM snippet that loads it) is present site-wide. Missing it on key pages — checkout, thank-you, blog — is the most common cause of gaps in your data.
Two config tags firing for the same measurement ID double-count sessions and events. Check GTM for duplicate Google tags.
If the container snippet is missing or broken, every tag inside it is offline — including consent controls — even if they look perfectly configured.
Under GDPR, analytics and ad tags must not fire before consent. Under US state laws they may fire but must honour an opt-out. Check each tag has a consent type or blocking trigger that matches your market.
Google's own tags rely on Consent Mode v2 signals to gate data collection. Confirm the consent state is being set before tags fire — not after.
A paused consent tag means no consent signals are sent at all, so every other tag runs blind regardless of what the banner shows the visitor.
Your own team's visits and known bots inflate sessions and skew engagement. Confirm internal traffic filters and bot filtering are on.
Check the referral and channel reports for fake referrers and self-referrals that misattribute your traffic and conversions.
A wrong currency silently corrupts every revenue figure, ROAS calculation and conversion value — and any conversions you import into Google Ads.
GA4 defaults to a short retention window. Confirm it is set to what you actually need for year-on-year analysis.
Marking trivial auto-collected events (like page_view) as key events floods your reports with meaningless 'conversions' and corrupts Google Ads bidding.
Duplicate purchase events inflate revenue and conversion rate. Check transaction IDs are de-duplicated.
Cross-check that the events you rely on are actually being sent by a GTM tag — a gap here means the conversion silently never records.
Leftover test pixels, debug tags, or development URLs in the Conversion Linker pollute live data and can leak data to the wrong place.
Tracking Auditor runs every check on this list against your live GA4 property and GTM container, scores the result A–F, and gives you a prioritised fix plan plus a client-ready export. See a sample report, or try the free checker first.
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