Tracking Audit: The 15-Point Checklist to Detect Flaws in Your Clients

"My campaigns aren't working", "I can't find my sales in Analytics".

As an agency, you hear these phrases every week. And often, the reflex is to question the creative, targeting, or budget.

But in 80% of the cases audited by A-Track in Romandy, the problem isn't the campaign. The problem is the thermometer.

If your client's tracking is faulty, your performance reports are wrong. You are optimizing based on erroneous data.

Here is the A-Track Expert Checklist. Use these 15 checkpoints to quickly audit the health of your e-commerce or lead gen clients' analytics setup. If you check off fewer than 12 points, it is urgent to intervene.

Why is a Tracking Audit Vital in 2025?

With the forced migration to GA4, the complexity of Server-Side, and the nFADP rules, tracking installations have become fragile gas plants. A regular audit allows you to:

1. Restore trust: Prove to the client that your numbers are accurate.

2. Save budget: Stop optimizing on "false" leads.

3. Secure the agency: Detect a compliance flaw before it becomes a legal issue.

The Checklist: The 15 Critical Checkpoints

A. General Hygiene & Configuration (The Basics)

1. Is the GA4 account structure clean? Check: Has the client retained unnecessary Universal Analytics (UA) properties? Are UA tags still polluting the site code?

• Impact: Slowing down the site and confusion in the data.

2. Is the "Cross-Domain Tracking" configured? Check: If the client uses Shopify but the blog is on WordPress, or if they use an external booking system, is the user tracked from one domain to another without breaking their session?

• Impact: If done incorrectly, a unique visit becomes 2 visitors. Conversion attribution is lost (Source: "Direct" instead of "Google Ads").

3. Exclusions of referral sites (A Swiss classic!) Check: In GA4, have you excluded paypal.com, twint.ch, postfinance.ch or stripe.com?

• Impact: If not, when the client returns from payment, GA4 attributes the sale to "Twint" instead of your Facebook campaign. Your ROAS collapses artificially.

4. Data retention period Check: By default, GA4 keeps data for 2 months. Is it set to 14 months in the settings?

• Impact: Inability to perform comparative analyses (Year-over-Year) next year.

B. Data Quality & E-commerce (The Money)

5. Deduplication of transactions Check: If the user refreshes the "Thank You" page, is the conversion counted twice?

• Impact: Artificial inflation of revenue by 10 to 20%. Use the transaction_id to deduplicate.

6. Consistency of currencies (CHF vs EUR) Check: If the site sells in multiple currencies, does GA4 correctly receive the currency code (CHF)?

• Impact: If GA4 thinks it's Dollars or Euros by default, your revenue reports are wrong due to the exchange rate.

7. Presence of a structured DataLayer Check: Does the site expose data (price, products, ID) in a clean data layer (window.dataLayer), or does your tracking rely on "DOM Scraping" (reading the HTML code of the page)?

• Impact: Scraping breaks with the slightest update to the site design. The DataLayer is robust.

8. Data thresholds (Thresholding) Check: Do you see lines with little data disappearing or being aggregated in GA4? Is Google Signals activated without enough traffic?

• Impact: Google masks data to protect anonymity. Sometimes, you need to disable Google Signals to regain the accuracy of small numbers.

C. Compliance & Advanced Technical (The Expertise)

9. Triggering before consent (Alert nFADP!) Check: Open the browser console in private browsing. Do GA4 or Facebook cookies drop before you click "Accept"?

• Impact: Illegal. Major risk in case of inspection.

10. Configuration of Google Consent Mode v2 Check: Are the gcs and gcd parameters present in the network requests to Google?

• Impact: If absent, loss of Google Ads remarketing audiences.

11. Management of PII (Personal Data) Check: Look at the URLs in GA4. Do you see clear emails (?email=client@test.com)?

• Impact: Violation of Google's terms. Risk of abrupt account deletion from GA4 by Google.

12. The quality of "Event Match Quality" (Facebook/LinkedIn) Check: In the Meta Business Manager, is the score above 6/10?

• Impact: Below that, you lose money on your ads. Often requires switching to Server-Side (CAPI).

D. Google Tag Manager (The Engine)

13. No "dirty" custom HTML tags Check: Is the GTM container filled with bulk copied-pasted scripts?

• Impact: Security risk (XSS) and site slowdown. Use official Templates.

14. The trigger management mode Check: Do you use triggers based on "Text Click" (e.g., Click on "Buy")?

• Impact: Very fragile. If the client changes the text to "Order", the tracking breaks. Use unique IDs or CSS classes.

15. The version of the container Check: Are there 50 unpublished versions or abandoned workspaces?

• Impact: Impossible to work cleanly as a team.

The A-Track Expert Advice: The Opportunity for the Agency

If, while going through this list on a client's account, you find more than 3 errors (which is almost certain), you have a business opportunity.

Do not attempt to cobble together a fix if it is not your job. Tracking has become an engineering profession, no longer a marketing one. Offer a "Tracking Upgrade Pack" to your client, and outsource the technical execution to A-Track.

You win on both fronts:

1. You bill for a consulting/project management service.

2. Your future campaigns will perform better thanks to clean data.