A Good Decision Made on Bad Data, is Still a Bad Decision

Now, I’m not going to lie, this post is going to be in direct contradiction to my next post. LMFAO

But I think two things can be true at once!

Okay, so let’s get into it.

It’s 2025. Privacy legislation is ramping up. Browsers are blocking cookies and tracking. Users are installing ad blockers.

And our data? It *feels* broken.

But just because it *feels* that way, doesn’t mean it is. At least not in the way you think…

Have you ever heard that a sprain almost feels worse than a break? If not, consider yourself lucky lol, but it’s true. It’s true IRL, and it’s true when it comes to your data.

Then, looking into it further and seeing that 422 purchases (almost 3% of all purchases) and $39,700 (about 2% of all revenue) were attributed to those sessions 😭

That is almost $40,000 that could have been attributed to the Meta ads running, the Klayvio campaigns, the SEO efforts the agency they hired is working on… But instead, it went to the payment processors because they weren’t marked as unwanted referrals.

Want to see if you’re reporting on any payment processors?

Run Your Free Settings Check!

You forget to setup (and verify) your cross cross-domain tracking and now you see that about 4.5% of all of your conversions are attributed to... well… yourself :)

Do you know where that user originated from? Nope. Was it our email campaign that actually drove folks to our blog? You’ll never know. Do you want to know? Probably.

The thing is, the data we need is there! It could be used! But because we didn’t do our due diligence with our setup (and monitoring), now we have fractured data.

Hey, when was the last time you did a full audit of your setup to make sure all of your events were actually tracking? And tracking CORRECTLY?!

Shit changes. People change their site. New events are created. Themes updated. Developers update their naming conventions.

Yet somehow, analytics, which can usually tell us the effectiveness of these changes, is never even thought of.

As time goes on, the issues worsen, and the data becomes more unreliable or disappears altogether.

If you see a 50% drop in conversions, maybe you should be looking at your tracking, NOT your ads that you haven’t made any changes to.

Spoiler: Changing those ads won’t fix the loss of data. 🤷‍♀️

To me, the frustrating thing is that we focus on the things we can’t change instead of the things we have complete control over!!!

Yes, it sucks that we can’t effectively stalk people the way we once did (but you’re telling me none of y’all thought that was weird?), but that doesn’t mean we have to fly blind.

In most cases, we generally have the data we need to make effective decisions IF our setups are complete and thorough.

A great place to start is by thoroughly checking your settings. The good news is you can run a super quick check at ga4helper.com/settings-checker and work through the best practices with the companion workbook ga4helper.com/workbook.