Checking the New Property Is Actually Collecting

Existing is not collecting

A property can be created, named, configured, and connected to nothing at all.

Its reports will show zero, which looks the same as a quiet week to anybody not paying attention.

So the assumption that it is working because it is there is the single most common failure in this whole migration.

Verifying takes ten minutes and needs no technical knowledge.

The realtime check

• Open the realtime report.
• Load your site on a phone.
• Watch for yourself to appear.
• Move to a second page.
• Confirm the page names are right.

You should appear within about half a minute. The fourth step matters as much as the first, since a tag can be present on the home page and missing on everything built separately, which is common where a page was added by a different person.

Check three pages, not one

Since partial installation is more common than none.

Your home page, a service page, and anything built outside the normal template, such as a landing page or something added years ago.

Each should register separately in realtime as you move between them.

Where one does not, that page has no tag, and it is frequently one of your busiest.

The pattern to watch for is a site where everything from the current template works and one older section does not.

That produces figures that are quietly wrong rather than obviously absent, which is worse.

Test the form as well

Because a conversion that is set up and not firing is the same as no conversion.

Submit your own enquiry form and watch whether the event appears.

Do the same for a telephone tap if you have one configured.

Then check the next day that it also appears in the ordinary reports rather than only in realtime, since those are populated separately.

A conversion visible in realtime and absent from the reports the following day is a configuration problem worth solving before July.

This is the check most people skip and the one that decides whether the property is useful.

A worked example

A business checked their new property, saw themselves in realtime, and considered it done.

In August their figures showed roughly half the visits they expected.

Three pages built for a campaign two years earlier, outside the main template, had never been tagged, and those pages were among their most visited.

The fix took ten minutes and the two months of incomplete data could not be recovered.

Checking three pages rather than one in June would have caught it.

They now check four pages after any change to the site.

Exclude your own visits

Which is worth doing while you are in there.

A small business site with modest traffic can have a meaningful share of its visits coming from the owner, the staff, and whoever maintains it.

Excluding internal traffic makes every figure more honest, and it is a setting rather than a project.

The same applies to any developer or agency working on the site regularly.

Do it now rather than after months of inflated figures, since the past cannot be cleaned.

Set the data retention period

Since the default is shorter than most people expect.

The new version has a setting controlling how long detailed data is kept, and it defaults to a period that will surprise anybody assuming it keeps everything forever.

Change it to the longest available, which is a single setting and costs nothing.

Doing it now applies going forward and does not recover anything already expired, which is why it belongs on the June list rather than a later one.

Note the date you changed it, so you know what period is affected.

Connect the other tools

Which completes the setup.

Link your search console so query data appears alongside the rest.

Link any advertising account you run.

Both are a few clicks and both are frequently missed, producing a property that works and answers half the questions it could.

Then leave it alone until August rather than configuring further, since the deadline work is done at that point.

Check it again after anything changes

Since tags are among the first things lost in ordinary site work.

A theme update, a plugin change, a new page, a hosting move, or a redesign can each remove or break the tag with nothing announcing it.

The symptom is a figure that falls to nothing and gets attributed to a quiet month, sometimes for a whole quarter.

Add the realtime check to whatever you already do after a change, alongside testing the contact form, which takes the same two minutes.

Those two checks together catch most of what silently breaks on a small business site.

Compare it against something real

The final check, and the one that catches errors no technical verification will.

Take a week where you know how many enquiries you received, from your inbox and your call log, and compare it against what the property recorded.

A figure that is roughly right confirms the whole setup; one that is half or double indicates a conversion counting wrongly, which is common and invisible otherwise.

Duplicate counting is the usual cause, where a form fires an event twice or a thank-you page is counted on a refresh.

Do that once now and once again after a month, since it is the only check that tests the numbers rather than the plumbing.

The counter-case

Some of this is over-preparation.

A business with two hundred visits a month will learn very little from any of these figures however carefully configured.

The verification steps also assume somebody will look at the reports, which for a good number of businesses is not true.

And an installation done by a competent supplier will usually have all of this handled.

Watch realtime on three pages, submit your own form, exclude internal traffic, and set the retention period.

The ten minutes

1. Open realtime.
2. Load the site on a phone.
3. Check three separate pages.
4. Submit your own form.
5. Check it again tomorrow.
6. Exclude internal traffic.
7. Set retention to the maximum.

Step three is the one that catches the common failure, since a tag installed on the template covers most of a site and misses whatever was built outside it.

Getting used to the new one is covered in running the new analytics alongside the old.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.