GA4 isn't broken. Your setup might be.

If your Google Analytics numbers don't match your sales, it's tempting to blame GA4. In our experience the tool is usually fine. The setup around it is what's off.

Here are the five tracking gaps we find most often, and how to fix each one before your next report.

1. Nothing is marked as a conversion

GA4 records plenty of events (page views, scrolls, clicks), but it doesn't know which ones matter to your business until you tell it. Without that, every report treats a form submission the same as a scroll.

Fix it: decide the two or three actions that really matter (a booked call, a contact form, a purchase), then mark those events as key events in GA4. Link them to your ads so campaigns can optimize toward them.

2. The tag is installed twice, or not at all

We regularly see GA4 added directly to the site and through Google Tag Manager, which double-counts visits. We also see pages, subdomains or booking tools with no tag at all, so whole chunks of the journey go missing.

Fix it: pick one way to install the tag. Then walk the key paths of your site with Tag Assistant and confirm each page fires exactly once.

3. Visitors leave your domain and come back as "referrals"

If checkout, booking or payments happen on another domain, GA4 can treat a returning customer as a brand-new visit from a "referral". Your payment provider ends up looking like your best traffic source.

Fix it: set up cross-domain measurement for the domains involved, and add your payment and booking providers to the referral exclusion list.

4. Your own team and spam are in the data

Staff browsing the site, developers testing a launch and form spam can all inflate numbers, especially on a smaller site where a few visits make a visible difference.

Fix it: define internal traffic in GA4 and filter it. Add a spam check to your forms, such as a honeypot field, so junk doesn't reach your reports or your inbox.

5. Analytics, ads and your CRM don't talk to each other

A lead arrives through an ad, becomes a customer three weeks later, and the sale never connects back to where it started. Inconsistent campaign tags (UTMs) make it worse: "Facebook", "facebook" and "fb" show up as three different sources.

Fix it: agree on one simple naming convention for campaign links, link Google Ads and Search Console to GA4, and pass the lead source into your CRM or form so you can see which channels produce customers, not just clicks.

One setting to change today

By default, GA4 keeps detailed event data for only two months. If you want to look back further in explorations, open Admin → Data settings → Data retention and change it to 14 months, the maximum for a standard property.

Where to start

You don't need to fix everything at once. Start with the conversions (gap 1) and the double-counting check (gap 2). Those two alone make most reports far more trustworthy.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes on your setup, let's have a coffee. We'll tell you honestly what's worth fixing and what isn't.