My biggest issue with GA and some solutions
I’ve been setting up GA for clients since Google released it.
Clients used to bring me in for a one-off project (no retainer!) -> I set everything up -> and in 18 months they were back where they started. Changes pushed to the site and GTM slowly broke the setup.
The optimal setup they hired me for was a very temporary thing. So a few years back I started pitching them a monitoring system.
My first iteration was built in sheets. I used the GA4 report builder plugin for sheets and then ran checks in sheets to see if a) their data dropped to 0 and b) if it suddenly increased or decreased. If something broke I used apps script (and later conditional notifications) to email me.
The idea was great — it helped me catch lots of issues quickly that otherwise might have taken weeks. But it’s bit annoying to set up each time and it was prone to breaking over time too as new events got added and old ones got removed.
So I decided to make this system into an app earlier this year. It's much easier to setup each time and easy to keep current. I've had a handful of beta testers using it this past few weeks with positive feedback so decided to release more generally.
link: datacanary.io