Stop losing signal every year the browser gets stricter

Our GA4 was a mess of duplicated events and half-built ecommerce for over a year. It now reconciles against our order table close enough that finance stopped keeping a separate spreadsheet.

A tag manager migration from years ago had never been finished. Every signup had been counting twice, and nobody had noticed because it was consistent. Finding that paid for the whole engagement.

The measurement rebuild came before a single campaign changed, and it felt slow at the time. In hindsight it's the only reason the decisions since then have been worth anything.

Safari visitors past the seven-day cookie window were showing up as new users every single visit. Our returning-customer rate looked terrible on paper and was actually fine the whole time.

We assumed our ad blocker traffic loss was just an unavoidable cost of doing business online. Moving the container server-side recovered a meaningful chunk of it within the first month.

Internal QA traffic had been hitting the live GA4 property for over a year, inflating every session count we reported to the board. Filtering it out dropped our numbers, but finally made them true.

The old container had been touched by three different freelancers over the years and nobody fully understood what half the tags did anymore. The documentation alone was worth the project.

We'd been told server-side tracking was overkill for a business our size. The migration took two weeks and the cookie lifetime alone recovered enough attribution to change how we read every channel.

Ecommerce events had been half-built since the original theme migration, with some purchases logging twice and others not logging at all. Reconciling it against Shopify's own order export closed a gap we'd been arguing about internally for months.