You launch a campaign. The clicks arrive. The spend is spent. GA4 then looks you dead in the eye and tells you most of it was “Direct”. That used to mean “someone forgot UTMs”. It often means something more mundane and more annoying: modern browser privacy protections have made link-based attribution less reliable, while most campaign measurement still depends on link-based signals arriving intact and being readable at precisely the right moment. This article is the plain-Eng

If you’ve ever stared at Google Search Console thinking, “We’re getting loads of impressions, so why does it feel like nobody’s actually buying anything?”, you’re in excellent company. Search Console tells you what Google is doing with your pages. GA4 tells you what people do once they arrive. Most businesses have both. Most businesses still can’t join the dots in a way that survives a meeting. That’s not because the tools are bad. It’s because there’s a missing layer in the

The bit nobody puts in the project plan Most analytics implementations “work”. Events fire. GA4 fills up. A dashboard appears. Someone says “we’re in a much better place now” with the confidence of a person who has not yet tried to use the data in a board meeting. Then comes the first proper question. Not “is GA4 installed?” (it is), but something deeply inconvenient, like: “Are we generating better leads than last quarter?” or “Which part of the site actually drives enquirie

There’s a particular kind of modern anxiety that only analytics can deliver. The dashboard is up, the numbers are down, someone has already said “Are we sure GA4 isn’t just… wrong?”, and you can feel a meeting invite being drafted in real time. GA4 is rarely “wrong”. It is, however, very good at faithfully reporting whatever you’ve actually implemented, including the bits you didn’t mean to implement. This article is a publish-ready, human-language GA4 audit you can run in ab