Blog / Tightening the Screws on Your GA4 Infrastructure

Tightening the Screws on Your GA4 Infrastructure

AUTHOR: Yosaif Cohain

Aug 06, 2024

4 Min Read

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Tell me if you’ve heard this story before: an organization was bad at data, so they rallied the troops, found the budget, invested in a new setup, generated excitement, used the data…and after months of using the data, they found out that their data was broken.

It’s happened to me, and I’ve seen it happen to others many times. It’s awful. Not only can this cause frustration (“we’ve reported on inaccurate data”), it can lead to a devastating false-belief that we just can’t get analytics right at our organization (“we’ve been burned before and we’ll be burned again”).

Part of working with web analytics is coming to an acceptance that data won’t be perfect and that things occasionally will break. There are so many things that can impact your setup that naming them all would be its own blog post. Some of the many examples that we’ve seen include…

Google Tag Manager (GTM) getting dropped from the site
A consent management platform (CMP) being added
A page launching with a new URL structure
A new video player being embedded
A redirect being employed and breaking attribution

…the list goes on! The website evolves, and sometimes your analytics setup doesn’t evolve at the same rate–and that’s when your data can break. It’s incredibly annoying, but it’s salvageable, as long as you catch it quickly enough.

Musicians regularly tune their instruments and replace heavily used parts like strings or valves. A garden doesn’t stay beautiful in perpetuity—it is weeded, mowed, fertilized, and sprayed for pests. I send my bike to the shop to be serviced every year. We go to the doctor for annual physical checkups. When I worked with IKEA at my previous job and complained to my German collaborator about the furniture always falling apart, she incredulously asked, “Well you tighten the screws every three months, right?” (I had no idea that was a thing. Do any Americans do this?)

Most things we rely on require periodic upkeep, and so does analytics. Your GA4 solution cannot follow the “set it and forget it” model.

HOW DOES ONE KNOW WHEN MAINTENANCE IS REQUIRED?

Use the smell test. Trust your gut as you’re looking at data. If something looks “weird”, investigate it deeper. Is this new or can we trend it backwards? Is there a logical explanation or is it possible a change was made and it’s impacting GA4? Does a spike coincide with a change we made? Don’t always take your data at face value.
Rely on triggered alerts. GA4 can alert you when your data falls below specific thresholds or shifts by too great an amount. It can even detect anomalies utilizing AI that is specific to your data. You should outsource this level of monitoring to Google’s bots.
Schedule periodic audits. We recommend auditing your setup at least once or twice a year. An audit should ensure the most critical components of your implementation are working correctly. Some of the items to check for include: GTM is present on every page, Ecommerce data is tracking properly, the GA4 tag is placed correctly and capturing the expected events. For many, this will require help from your analytics partner.
Proactively incorporate GA4 updates into site updates. Companies that are great at analytics understand that web changes impact GA4 data quality, and bake a period for updating and testing web changes before they go live into their process. You might need to edit existing tags, build new tags, update admin configurations, and/or update reports and dashboards. If possible, it’s always better to make tracking updates before the website changes are published so that your data collection efforts aren’t disrupted.

Yes, it’s time we add GA4 maintenance to the list of “unsexy things that make digital marketing happen” (along with SEO, site load times, list scrubbing, and many other GA4 items). No one is going to celebrate maintenance like a TikTok video that goes viral, a campaign A/B test that crushes results, or a new website that gets praised by patrons and your board.

But…you wouldn’t have read this far in this post if you didn’t believe that being data-driven is critical. Paramount to being data-driven is having great data that we trust, and that requires work–both in the initial setup, and in its maintenance.

WE’RE HERE TO HELP!

Look, we don’t like to explicitly push our services in blog posts. But a moment of total transparency: we do offer (and encourage!) ongoing analytics maintenance in our partnerships! And we do so because we care desperately about helping our industry stay data-driven, we want the fruits of our implementation labor to continue to flourish, and we know how hard it is to resource for this kind of work internally.

Get in touch with our team to see how we can best support you with ongoing GA4 maintenance.

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