8 Signs Your GA4 Property Needs Expert Help

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The following are the 8 Signs your GA4 property is critically ill and requires expert help.

#1 The unassigned traffic is one of the top 5 traffic sources and/or makes up more than 20% of your overall website traffic.

Unassigned traffic indicates serious issues with your data collection and is pretty much useless for data analysis.

#2 The (not set) traffic is one of the top 5 traffic sources and/or makes up more than 20% of your overall website traffic.

Just like ‘unassigned’, the (not set) also suggests serious issues with your data collection and is pretty much useless for data analysis.

When you can’t trace the origin of a significant portion of your traffic, it becomes very hard to analyze and optimize your marketing and sales funnels accurately.

#3 The (not set) landing pages are one of the top 5 traffic sources and/or make up more than 20% of your overall website traffic.

The (not set) landing pages point to problems with page tracking implementation.

Understanding the typical user journey from a landing page through to conversion becomes very hard when the entry point is unknown for a large segment of traffic.

#4 The (other) row is one of the top rows in your GA4 data tables and/or makes up more than 20% of your overall website traffic.

When using GA4 reports, you should avoid cardinality wherever possible. That’s how you can remove the (other) row from appearing in your reports.

#5 You frequently exceed the Google Analytics data API quota limits and/or the daily BigQuery export limits.

Exceeding the Google Analytics data API quota limits and/or the daily BigQuery export limits are good enough reasons for some businesses to give up on GA4 completely.

There needs to be a solid business case and approval process before you start tracking events or high cardinality dimensions.

The best practice is to minimize the number of events you track so you don’t easily hit the API quota or BigQuery export limits.

Identify the most critical events (like ecommerce and conversion events) that directly impact your business objectives. Track these events first. Remove any unnecessary events.

#6 Your ecommerce tracking reports are infested with (not set) issues or missing, duplicate or incomplete data.

Without accurate data on which products are selling well or which pages are converting, optimising your ecommerce website and user experience becomes very hard.

A/B testing results may be skewed, leading to incorrect conclusions about what changes actually improve sales.

You may underestimate or overestimate the ROI of various marketing efforts, leading to misallocating budget and resources.

#7 You track trivial events like ‘page_view’ as key events.

You inflate the conversion data when you track trivial events as key events.

Important metrics like conversion rate become meaningless when trivial user actions are counted as conversions.

When these inflated key events are imported to Google Ads as conversions, the platform uses this data for bidding and optimization.

This can lead to:

Overbidding on keywords or placements that aren’t actually driving valuable actions.
Misallocation of budget towards campaigns or ad groups that appear to perform well but aren’t generating real business value.
Incorrect assessment of campaign ROI.

When trivial events are mixed with genuinely important conversions, it becomes harder to identify which marketing efforts are truly driving valuable user actions.

#8 Your GA4 property records a large volume of duplicate and/or key events.

Duplicate events in GA4 can make your entire tracking setup flawed, leading to numerous issues that can severely impact your data collection, data analysis and decision-making processes.