Posts on Analytics.
4 posts tagged "Analytics".
Seven minutes on /work/ and no hire button: the problem wasn't the copy
GA4 showed a single desktop visitor returning thirteen-plus times, spending seven minutes straight on /work/ with no way to act. The instinct was to rewrite the copy. The data was pointing at something structural — the page had no till.
GA4 saw nothing for four days. The fix was gated behind the consent it was meant to make optional.
The Consent Mode v2 default that was supposed to fire for every visitor lived inside a function that only ran after someone clicked Accept. So first-time visitors loaded no analytics at all, and GA4 recorded nothing.
GA4 went dark for four days. Both fixes were right. One was in the wrong place.
Two PRs, each diagnosing a real fault, and GA4 still flat four days later. The problem wasn’t whether the consent signal was present — it was where in the document it lived relative to gtag.js.
My canonical tags were deindexing my own articles. GA4 had been right all along.
GA4 showed 2 events per seven days across a site with 70+ articles. The first instinct was broken tracking. The real cause was canonical tags instructing Google to ignore the pages meant to rank — a discovery collapse that looks identical to a measurement failure until GSC gives it away.