Troubleshooting analytics problems

Something looks wrong with your analytics data? You are not alone — analytics issues are surprisingly common, and most have straightforward causes. This guide walks through the most frequent problems and how to resolve them.

Problem: No data is appearing in GA4

Possible causes:

1. Your Google tag has not been installed yet
2. The tag was accidentally removed from the site
3. Google Tag Manager is not firing the Google Analytics tag
4. The tag carries the wrong Measurement ID — it should start with G- and match the one on your data stream

How to check:

Visit your website and go to your GA4 account. Open the Realtime report (Reports > Realtime). If your visit appears there within a few minutes, tracking is working. If it does not appear at all, something is broken.

Also check whether your own visits are being filtered out. Google Analytics has an internal-traffic data filter that excludes activity from a given IP address or range, so your office may never show up. Try visiting the site from your phone on mobile data — if you appear in Realtime on mobile but not on your office Wi-Fi, that filter is the likely reason.

Problem: Numbers look much lower than expected

Possible causes:

1. Many visitors are declining the cookie consent banner
2. Ad blockers and privacy browsers are blocking GA4
3. The site is new and traffic genuinely is low
4. A date range filter is showing only a short period

How to check:

Compare your GA4 session count against your hosting provider's raw server log visitor count (if available). Analytics will always miss some visits — ad blockers, privacy browsers and people declining cookies all take a share — so a gap between the two is normal. There is no published figure for how big it should be, so treat the gap as something to measure for your own site and watch over time, rather than a fixed percentage.

Problem: Conversions are showing zero

Possible causes:

1. The event has never been marked as a key event (Google renamed conversions to key events)
2. The form or purchase flow is broken
3. The right events are not being sent from the website at all

How to check:

Test the action yourself (fill in your own contact form, or complete a test purchase). Then check the Realtime report — you should see the event appear, and your key events listed in the "Key events by Event name" card. If nothing appears, the action is not being tracked.

If you see the event in Realtime but the Key events column in your reports stays at zero, the event has probably not been marked as a key event.

Problem: Sudden drop in traffic

Possible causes:

1. A Google algorithm update affected your rankings
2. A technical issue broke the tracking code
3. Seasonal variation (compare to the same period last year)
4. A major page was accidentally removed or set to "no index"
5. The site went down and recovered

How to check:

First check Google Search Console: look at the Page indexing report (some of Google's own pages still call it the Index coverage report) for pages that have dropped out of the index, and the Manual actions report for any penalty. Then compare the drop period to the same period last year to separate seasonal from algorithmic. Check your hosting provider's uptime monitor for any outage records.

Problem: Traffic source data looks wrong

Possible causes:

1. Email campaigns are being tagged as "Direct" (missing UTM parameters)
2. Social media traffic is being miscategorised
3. Referral spam is inflating certain channels

How to check:

Review the Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition report and look for anything unusual. If you cannot find that report, it may have been removed from your property's left-hand menu — an editor can add it back. If "Direct" is unusually high, consider adding UTM links to your email campaigns and social posts.

Problem: I can see data but not for my dates

Possible causes:

1. The date range in GA4 is set to a period before tracking was installed
2. A date comparison filter is active and confusing the view

How to check:

Look at the date range selector above the report and make sure it covers the period you want to examine. GA4 can only show data from the point tracking was first installed — it cannot fill in the past. Bear in mind too that recent days keep moving: Google says processing can take 24 to 48 hours, and figures may change during that window.

Common questions

My traffic looked fine, then dropped by 50% — what happened?

Check three things in order: (1) Is tracking still working? Test with Realtime. (2) Did anything change on the site (plugin updates, redesign, domain changes)? (3) Did Google announce a ranking update around that time? Google publishes its own list of these.

GA4 shows very different numbers from our old Universal Analytics — is this a problem?

Different is expected. GA4 counts users, sessions and engagement differently, so the two were never directly comparable. Google's own guidance on the changeover said pageview discrepancies of up to 10%, and user and session discrepancies of up to 20%, could be expected and were not a cause for concern. Note that Universal Analytics stopped processing data on 1 July 2023 and its reports went away in July 2024, so any UA figures you are comparing against are historical.

I do not have access to GA4 — can you check for me?

Yes. Reach out to us with details of what you are seeing (or not seeing) and we will investigate on your behalf.

Related guides

• What is Google Analytics (GA4)?
• How GA4 gets set up on your site
• Cookie consent & banners explained
• UTM links for campaign tracking
• What is Google Tag Manager?

Learn more

• Troubleshoot tag setup on your website — Google Help
• Preview and debug containers — Tag Manager Help