What Does a Google Analytics Audit Include?

Performing a Google Analytics audit is the single most important step you can take to trust the data you use for making business decisions. This process is a foundational health check that ensures your tracking is accurate, complete, and reliable. This guide provides a comprehensive, step-by-step checklist to help you audit your own Google Analytics setup and start making decisions with confidence.

Why a Google Analytics Audit is Non-Negotiable

Basing your marketing strategy, budget allocation, and business plans on bad data is like trying to navigate with a broken compass. Inaccurate analytics can lead you to shut down well-performing campaigns, invest in channels that don't work, or misinterpret user behavior completely. Garbage in, garbage out.

Most analytics setups have hidden flaws that silently corrupt data over time. An audit helps you uncover and fix common issues like:

• Inflated traffic numbers from bots and internal employees.
• Inaccurate sales data due to broken e-commerce tracking.
• "Direct" traffic masking your most valuable marketing channels.
• Broken conversion tracking that makes it impossible to measure ROI.
• Missing data from crucial pages on your site.

By regularly auditing your account, you transform Google Analytics from a potentially misleading tool into a reliable source of truth that powers growth.

Getting Started: What You'll Need

Before you begin, gather the following to make the process smooth:

• Admin-level access: You'll need "Administrator" permissions for the Google Analytics account to access all settings.
• Access to your backend: This includes your website CMS (like WordPress or Webflow) or Google Tag Manager to check how tracking codes are installed.
• List of your KPIs: Have a clear understanding of the key metrics and business goals you want to track (e.g., leads, sales, phone calls, form submissions).
• A place for notes: Create a simple spreadsheet or document to log your findings, assign tasks, and track your progress.

The Step-by-Step Google Analytics Audit Checklist

Follow this checklist to systematically review your account. We've broken it down into key areas covering your account structure, data integrity, and vital integrations.

Part 1: Account & Property Configuration

This first section focuses on the structural foundation of your analytics. Flaws here can impact every single report you view.

1. Verify Correct Tracking Code Installation

The most basic check is ensuring the GA tracking code (or GA4 measurement ID via Gtag.js) is present on every single page of your site. If pages are missing the code, traffic to those pages won't be recorded, creating holes in your data.

• How to check: Right-click on a page of your website, select "View Page Source," and use Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F) to search for "G-" (for GA4) or "UA-" (for Universal Analytics).
• For the pros: Use a browser extension like Google's Tag Assistant or the free crawling tool Screaming Frog to scan your entire site and confirm the tag is present on all URLs.

Make sure you don't have multiple tracking codes firing on the same page. A common mistake is having a tag hardcoded on the site and also deployed via Google Tag Manager. This double-tracking inflates your pageviews and session counts, making your data unusable.

2. Standardize Account, Property, and View Naming

In GA4, the structure is Account > Property > Data Stream. In Universal Analytics, it was Account > Property > View. A clean, logical structure is crucial, especially if you manage multiple websites.

• Is the structure logical? For example, production websites, staging sites, and mobile apps should generally be in separate properties.
• Are naming conventions clear? Instead of "My property," use a descriptive name like "[Your Website] - Production." This prevents confusion and errors.

3. Exclude Unwanted Traffic

Your analytics reports should reflect real customer activity, not your internal team checking the website or random bot traffic. Failure to filter this out will skew your data.

• Filter Internal IP Addresses: Exclude traffic from your office, home offices of remote employees, and any agencies or freelancers who work on your site. In GA4, you can do this under Data Streams > Configure tag settings > Define internal traffic.
• Exclude Unwanted Referrals: This is critical for e-commerce. Payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, or other third-party booking tools can hijack a user's original source, making it look like your own cart is a source of traffic. In GA4, head to Data Streams > Configure tag settings > List unwanted referrals and add the domains you want to exclude (e.g., paypal.com, shop.app).
• Enable Bot Filtering: In Universal Analytics, there's a simple checkbox in your View settings called "Bot Filtering." GA4 handles a lot of bot filtering automatically, but the IP filters mentioned above are still essential.

Part 2: Data Integrity & Collection

With the structure in place, it's time to vet the quality of the data flowing into your reports.

4. Check for Self-Referrals

A "self-referral" is when your own domain (e.g., yourwebsite.com) appears as a traffic source in your referral reports. This is a red flag. It typically means a user's session broke and then started a new one, losing the original traffic source. It's often caused by missing tracking code on certain pages or improper cross-domain tracking setup (e.g., when a user moves from blog.yourwebsite.com to shop.yourwebsite.com). Fixing this is key to accurately attributing your traffic sources.

5. Audit Your Conversion Tracking

If you don't have conversion tracking set up, you have no way to measure success. If it's set up incorrectly, your insights will be wrong.

• Review Active Conversions: Go to the Conversions or Goals (UA) section. Are your primary business objectives tracked here? (e.g., "purchase," "generate_lead").
• Test Every Conversion: Don't assume they work. Go through the process yourself - fill out your contact form, make a test purchase - and verify in real-time reports that the conversion is firing correctly.
• Remove Redundant Goals: Old, duplicated, or irrelevant goals create noise in your reports. Clean them up so you're only focused on the actions that matter.

6. Analyze Campaign Tagging (UTM Hygiene)

UTM parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) are custom tags you add to URLs to tell Google Analytics exactly where traffic is coming from. Inconsistent UTM tagging is one of the quickest ways to create messy, unusable campaign reports.

Check your Campaign reports for inconsistencies like:

• Case Sensitivity: facebook, Facebook, and FaceBook will be tracked as three separate sources.
• Medium Confusion: cpc, paid-search, and ppc are all split into different mediums instead of being unified.
• Whitespace and Typos: spring_sale vs. spring-sale vs. SpringSale.

Establish a company-wide convention for creating UTM codes (a simple shared spreadsheet often works) to ensure everyone tags links in the same way.

Part 3: Key Integrations

Google Analytics becomes significantly more powerful when connected to other Google Marketing Platform products.

7. Ensure Google Search Console is Fused with GA4

Integrating Google Search Console brings crucial organic search query data directly into Google Analytics. Without this, your organic keyword data is nearly non-existent. You can link them under Admin > Product Integrations > Search Console links. A visible Search Console report collection in GA4 confirms the link is active.

8. Verify Google Ads Integration

If you're running Google Ads, this integration is essential. It pulls cost, click, and impression data into GA4, allowing you to analyze post-click behavior and calculate ROI within the same platform. Check that this link is active under Product Integrations and that auto-tagging is enabled in your Google Ads account.

9. Confirm E-commerce Tracking is Accurate

For any site selling products online, e-commerce tracking is your most important dataset. Not only should it be enabled, but you need to check that the data it reports is accurate.

• Compare GA vs. Your Backend: Pull a revenue report from GA for the last 30 days and compare it to the revenue shown in your e-commerce platform (like Shopify or WooCommerce). The numbers should be close. Large, consistent discrepancies of 10% or more suggest your tracking is broken.
• Check All Metrics: Ensure that transactions, revenue, product data, and shipping fees are all being passed correctly into Google Analytics.

Final Thoughts

An organized Google Analytics audit cleans your data so you can stop guessing and start making informed decisions. By following this checklist, you can identify critical errors, build a foundation of trustworthy data, and gain clear visibility into what's actually driving your business forward. A regular audit, maybe quarterly or semi-annually, is one of the highest-impact habits any data-driven team can adopt.

Of course, once your data is clean, the challenge shifts to analysis. Manually logging into Google Analytics, Ads, your CRM, and other platforms to pull reports is slow and tedious. That’s why we built Graphed to help. We make it easy to connect all your data sources in one place. You can then use simple, natural language to instantly build live dashboards and get answers, turning that beautiful, clean data into actionable insights in seconds instead of hours.