Website Analytics Checklist

In GA4, run the Acquisition > Traffic acquisition report week-over-week and compare against the same week last year. Flag any channel down more than 15% — most often Organic Search dropping after a Google core update or Direct collapsing because UTMs are misconfigured on a new campaign.

Compare GA4 channel groupings (Paid Search, Paid Social, Organic Search, Organic Social, Email, Direct, Referral) against Triple Whale or Northbeam for paid attribution. iOS 14.5 + cookie deprecation makes last-click GA4 underreport Meta and TikTok by 20-40% — use blended MER as the truth metric.

Run the GA4 Landing page report. Note any new entries in the top 20 — usually a viral product page or a blog post that picked up rankings. Confirm those pages have working add-to-cart and a relevant cross-sell module.

Open Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar session replays for the affected URL. Common culprits: a recent theme deploy broke mobile layout, an out-of-stock variant is the default selection, or an ad set is sending wrong-intent traffic. Document the root cause before the next CRO meeting.

Build a Path Exploration starting at view_item and ending at purchase. Look for unexpected detours — customers bouncing to FAQ or shipping pages mid-checkout usually signals a trust gap that a checkout reassurance module can fix.

Pull the Shopify Search & Discovery (or Searchanise / Algolia) query log. Zero-results queries are merchandising gold — either the SKU exists but isn't tagged, or it's a product opportunity. Add synonyms for the top zero-result terms.

Run the Funnel Exploration: view_item → add_to_cart → begin_checkout → add_payment_info → purchase. The shipping step is the typical leak — high shipping cost or surprise tax shows up here. Compare mobile vs. desktop drop-off separately.

Open Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar scroll maps for the three highest-revenue PDPs. If the add-to-cart button sits below the average scroll depth on mobile, that's a sticky-ATC opportunity worth A/B testing.

Confirm the abandoned-cart and abandoned-checkout flows are firing without a race condition — recent reports of customers receiving "you forgot something" emails 30 minutes after completing checkout point to a flow filter that doesn't re-check cart status at send time.

Don't call winners before reaching 95% confidence and at least one full purchase cycle (typically 14 days for considered purchases). Stop tests that are clearly losing — they cost revenue every day they run.

Returning-customer CVR is typically 2-4× new-visitor CVR. If the gap is narrowing, the post-purchase flow (Klaviyo, Recharge, Smile loyalty) likely needs attention. If new-visitor CVR is collapsing, suspect ad creative or landing page mismatch.

Pull Google Search Console Performance and your rank tracker (Ahrefs, Semrush). Flag any page that lost three or more positions on a head term — common after a core update or when a competitor refreshed their content.

Use GA4 conversion paths or Northbeam to attribute orders that touched a blog post or guide. Content that assists conversion but never gets last-click credit is the first thing CFOs cut and the first thing you defend with this report.

Review LCP, INP, and CLS in the Core Web Vitals report. Mobile thresholds: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1. The most common Shopify offender is an oversized hero image or a third-party app injecting render-blocking JS.

Pull the weekly summary from your uptime monitor (Better Uptime, Pingdom, UptimeRobot). Any checkout outage longer than 5 minutes warrants a post-mortem — calculate lost revenue at average sessions × CVR × AOV for the window.

Run Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit. Pay particular attention to discontinued SKUs returning 404 — set 301 redirects to the parent collection or replacement product before paid traffic and backlinks bleed out.

Cross-check Search Console > Pages > Not found (404) for any URL still receiving impressions.

Use the GA4 DebugView, Meta Pixel Helper, and TikTok Pixel Helper on the live site. Theme deploys frequently strip the purchase event from the order-status page; if the e-commerce numbers in GA4 don't match Shopify Analytics within 5%, tracking is broken.