The Job Analytics Is Actually Supposed to Do
Marketing analytics has a single job: surface the signal that helps a decision-maker make a better decision than they would have made without it. Anything else is noise dressed up as insight. The teams that struggle with analytics usually don't have a data problem — they have a clarity problem. They're collecting everything, reporting most of it, and acting on almost none of it.
The discipline we recommend is to work backwards from the decisions that need to be made each week and each quarter, and design dashboards around those. If a metric doesn't change what someone does, it doesn't belong on the screen. This sounds obvious. Almost no analytics setup actually follows it.
GA4 Setup Essentials
GA4 is the default web analytics layer for most businesses, and the default setup is rarely sufficient. The implementation work that matters:
- Custom events for the conversions that matter, not just the auto-collected page_view and scroll events. Define what counts as a meaningful interaction for your business and instrument it explicitly.
- Enhanced measurement reviewed, not just enabled. The default events fire on a lot of low-signal interactions. Decide which actually inform decisions.
- BigQuery export turned on from day one, even if you don't use it yet. GA4's UI is opinionated and sometimes restrictive — the raw event data in BigQuery is where serious analysis happens.
- Consent mode and cookie banner properly configured, with the modeling behavior that fills in gaps when users decline consent.
- UTMs governed by a documented convention. The largest analytics quality issue in most accounts is inconsistent campaign tagging.
Dashboard Design: One Screen, One Decision
The dashboard pattern that actually gets used: one screen per decision-maker, one decision per screen, no more than five to seven numbers visible at a time. A weekly marketing review dashboard for a head of growth might show: blended CAC, channel-level efficiency, week-over-week and 13-week trend, a single creative-performance signal, and one or two leading indicators. That's it. Everything else lives a click deeper.
The opposite pattern — the 47-tab Looker Studio report with every metric a stakeholder ever asked for — is the dashboard nobody reads. Every metric you add to a dashboard taxes the attention of every reader. Be ruthless about subtraction.
A test that's saved us a lot of time: if you can't articulate the decision a number is meant to inform, take it off the dashboard. If a stakeholder pushes back, ask them what they'd do differently if the number went up by 20%. If they don't have an answer, the number doesn't belong on the screen.
