Why My Google Analytics Was Wrong for Months — and What It Took to Finally Fix It

For months, my numbers on SEBAF IT did not make sense.

Traffic was clearly happening. LinkedIn activity said so. Search visibility said so. Real people were landing on the site. But Google Analytics kept showing results that were too low to be credible. So instead of having no counter at all, I kept Post Views Counter running as a practical fallback. Not because it was elegant, but because bad visibility is still better than flying completely blind.

That setup annoyed me for a long time.

Not just because the numbers were off, but because the Google measurement stack has become absurdly hard to understand for normal humans.

Google Tag Manager, Google tags, GA4 properties, Measurement IDs, Consent Mode, Site Kit, cookies, modeled data, plugin snippets, legacy remnants — and somewhere in the middle of that mess you are expected to make clean business decisions.

The uncomfortable truth is this: even if you are not technically clueless, this stuff can still waste hours of your life.

SEBAF IT Fixing Google-Analytics on WordPress

And that is exactly why many website owners never clean it up. They postpone it, work around it, or tell themselves the reporting is “good enough”. Usually it is not.

So I finally sat down and fixed it properly.

The first step was brutal but necessary: remove unnecessary complexity. I had a Google Tag Manager plugin in the stack even though I was not actively using Google Tag Manager as an operational tag management layer anymore. That is a typical WordPress story. Something got installed for a valid reason at some point, then the setup evolved, then nobody fully revisited the architecture. The result is technical residue, not technical strategy.

So out it went.

That does not mean all “tags” disappeared. This is where many people get confused. Removing the GTM plugin does not mean removing Google Analytics itself. Google still uses tag identifiers for measurement, and Site Kit can place the necessary Analytics code directly without needing a separate GTM plugin on the WordPress side. Google’s current setup also distinguishes between Tag Manager, the Google tag, and Analytics destinations, which is precisely why these setups often look more mysterious than they really are.

The second issue was consent.

This was the real blocker. A broken or incomplete consent setup can make analytics look dead, half-dead, or randomly inconsistent. Site Kit supports consent mode, but it depends on a consent solution that actually communicates the visitor’s choices properly. Consent Mode does not replace a cookie banner. It reacts to the banner and adjusts Google tag behavior accordingly.

So the old consent stack had to go as well.

I replaced it with a leaner setup and moved to WPConsent. The goal was not “more features”. The goal was clarity. One banner, one understandable flow, one clean connection to Consent Mode v2, and one primary reporting source. WPConsent documents native support for Google Consent Mode v2, and Google documents that consent mode adjusts measurement behavior based on user choice rather than acting as a banner by itself.

That gave me a much cleaner end state.

Now the setup is slim, readable, and defendable. Google Site Kit is the primary measurement source. The GTM plugin is gone.

The consent layer is no longer a mystery box. Real-time reporting works again. Accept and reject behavior can actually be tested instead of guessed.

And most importantly, the whole thing is understandable enough that I can come back to it later without wanting to throw the laptop out of the window.

The Business End of it

There is also a business lesson in this.

A website is not “done” because it loads and looks decent. If the data layer underneath is unreliable, then your decisions are unreliable too. You may think a campaign failed when tracking failed. You may think a page has no traction when consent or tagging is broken. You may believe your freelancer “set up analytics” when in reality you got a pile of plugins, legacy leftovers, and wishful thinking.

That is the difference between cheap website handling and actual website ownership.

The 15-year-old son of your petrol station attendant may indeed install a plugin for 50 euros a month. No disrespect to him. But that is not the same as understanding what is running, why it is running, whether it still belongs in the stack, and what it costs you when it quietly fails.

That part is not glamorous. It is just professional.

And frankly, this is why many companies underestimate website support. They see pages, themes, and contact forms. They do not see measurement architecture, consent logic, reporting integrity, plugin overlap, technical debt, and the cost of getting those things wrong.

Today’s cleanup was not exciting. It was not flashy. But it was one of those pieces of work that quietly upgrades the whole operation.

Cleaner stack. Better data. Less nonsense.

That is usually where the real value sits.

The Business End of it

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