The connection
From your Alpative console, click “Connect” next to Google. A single authorization covers Analytics and Search Console. Sheets and Tag Manager connect separately, with the same Google account.
List my accessible Google Analytics properties, with their ID and the associated website.
If you manage several properties, note the one you care about: naming it in your questions avoids back-and-forth.
Why your numbers can differ
A gap with what you see in the Google interface is not an error. Three causes, in order of frequency:
- The property's time zone. A day does not start at the same hour everywhere, and period boundaries shift the totals.
- Sampling and thresholding. On large volumes or fine-grained segments, Google approximates, in its interface and in the data returned to your AI alike, but not always in the same way.
- Data freshness. The last 24 to 48 hours keep moving. Comparing yesterday's report to this morning's inevitably gives two numbers.
Seven questions that replace seven reports
Understand a variation
Compare the 30 days before yesterday to the 30 days before that: sessions, users, conversions and conversion rate. Then break the gap down by acquisition channel and tell me which one explains most of the variation.
Which pages lost the most sessions over this period? For the top five, tell me whether the drop comes from incoming traffic or from a change in behavior on the page.
Find the leaks
Which high-traffic pages have an engagement rate clearly below the site average? Rank them by volume of lost sessions.
Compare the conversion rate on mobile and on desktop, page by page, for the pages that matter most in the purchase journey. Flag gaps above 30%.
Judge acquisition
For each acquisition channel over 90 days: sessions, conversions, conversion rate. Which one brings me the most volume, which one brings the best quality, and are they the same?
Which traffic sources appeared or disappeared this month compared to last month?
Follow live
What is happening on the site right now? Number of active users, pages viewed, sources.
What Google Analytics won't tell you
Three limits to keep in mind before concluding, whatever tool is querying the data:
| Limit | Practical consequence |
|---|---|
| Consent | Visitors who refuse cookies are partially or entirely missing. Your real traffic is higher than what is shown. |
| Attribution | A journey crossing several channels is attributed according to a model. Changing the model changes the winners, without a single sale having moved. |
| Offline | A phone call, a store visit, a quote signed by email do not exist in Analytics, unless you have fed them in. |
This is especially true for businesses where most of the business happens over the phone. Before judging a channel on its conversion rate, check that what you call a “conversion” actually covers what makes you money.