Guides
Practical answers to the measurement questions we get asked most, from the team that debugs them daily.
When do you actually need server-side GTM?
Server-side GTM is sold as the future of measurement and bought as a fix for problems it does not solve. It will not restore the data users declined to give, and it will not repair broken attribution. What it offers is durability and control, and that is worth paying for only past certain thresholds. Here is the honest decision framework we use with clients.
How to detect duplicate transactions in GA4
Duplicate purchase events are the quietest revenue inflation in GA4: everything looks plausible, ROAS looks a little better than reality, and nobody notices until a finance reconciliation fails. Here is how we detect them in BigQuery, what causes them, and the one revenue field that inflates numbers without any duplicate at all.
GA4 BigQuery export: the gotchas nobody warns you about
The GA4 BigQuery export is the best thing about GA4, and the most misunderstood. It is not a copy of your reports: it is raw event data with its own delays, schema logic and definitions. Here are the gotchas that cost teams the most time, from a team that queries this export every day.
Why is direct traffic inflated in GA4?
Direct traffic in GA4 grows for one dominant reason on e-commerce sites: payment gateway redirects breaking session attribution, so purchases that paid channels earned get credited to direct or to the gateway’s own domain. Here is how to diagnose it in minutes and fix it properly.