Most GA4 properties have problems their owners don't know about. Internal traffic polluting session counts, payment processors creating ghost referral sessions, conversion events that haven't fired in months. These issues don't announce themselves — they silently corrupt the data you're making decisions with.
This checklist covers all 47 checks we run in our automated audit tool, organised by module so you can work through them systematically. If you'd rather not do this manually, you can run the automated audit and get results in 60 seconds.
1. Account & Property Setup
Before anything else, the foundations need to be right. These settings affect every report you'll ever run.
- Timezone matches your primary business location (not UTC)
- Currency set correctly for your market
- Data retention set to 14 months (default is 2 — change this immediately)
- Google Signals enabled (required for cross-device reporting)
- Industry category set (affects benchmarking)
- Google Ads account linked (if running paid campaigns)
- Attribution model reviewed and appropriate for your business
- User permissions audited — no unnecessary admin access
2. Event Tracking Quality
Events are the foundation of everything in GA4. Bad event data means bad everything else.
- All event names use snake_case (not camelCase or Title Case)
- No events firing 0 times in the past 30 days (zombie events)
- Conversion events confirmed via Admin API — not just event existence
- Purchase events include transaction_id, value, and currency parameters
- No duplicate event firing (same event firing 2x per interaction)
- Form submission events present and recording data
- No PII in event parameters (emails, phone numbers, names)
- Custom events follow GA4 recommended naming where applicable
3. Configuration & Customisation
GA4 gives you 50 custom dimension slots and 50 custom metric slots. Once they're full, you can't add more without deleting existing ones.
- Custom dimension quota below 70% (50 total available)
- All custom dimensions have descriptions
- No audiences with 1-day membership duration (usually misconfigured)
- Internal traffic filter active (office/developer IPs excluded)
- Payment processors excluded from referral sources
- Unassigned channel traffic below 10% of total sessions
- UTM medium values are standard (cpc, organic, email, social, referral)
4. Data Integrity & Accuracy
Your data might look fine on the surface while being fundamentally broken underneath.
- No localhost or staging traffic in production property
- Engagement rate above 1% (below this suggests bot/spam traffic)
- Pages per session between 1.1 and 20 (outside this range = likely misconfigured)
- "(not set)" dimension values below 5% of total
- Year-over-year session trends within ±30% (larger swings need investigation)
- BigQuery export configured for long-term data warehousing
5. Privacy & Compliance
This section matters more every year. GDPR fines are real, and GA4 has several settings that affect your legal position.
- Consent Mode v2 implemented (mandatory for EEA traffic since March 2024)
- No PII in page URLs or page titles
- No passwords, tokens, or API keys in tracked URLs
- Data redaction enabled for email addresses
- User deletion request process documented
- Cookie expiry settings reviewed
6. Data Streams & Collection
- No duplicate web streams for the same domain
- All streams received data in the last 7 days
- Enhanced measurement settings reviewed per stream
- Cross-domain tracking configured if you have multiple domains
- No suspicious Measurement Protocol hits inflating data
7. Reporting & Exploration
- Key conversion events have data in the reporting period
- E-commerce funnel events all present (view_item → add_to_cart → begin_checkout → purchase)
- Attribution window appropriate for your sales cycle
- Key dimensions returning data (channel, source, medium)
Run the audit automatically
Working through this checklist manually takes 2–4 hours if you know what you're doing, longer if you don't. Our automated tool runs all 47 checks in under 60 seconds and delivers a prioritised PDF report with specific recommendations for every issue found.
