What does marketing analytics include?
Marketing analytics is the setup that records what visitors do on your site and the reports that turn those records into decisions. For most businesses that means GA4 for data, Google Tag Manager for tracking, consent mode for privacy, and Looker Studio for reporting.
When the setup is wrong, every other decision suffers. Ad platforms optimize toward bad signals, budgets go to the wrong campaigns, and nobody trusts the weekly report. We start by making the numbers right, then make them readable.
How do you set up GA4 and Google Tag Manager?
We plan the events first, then build them in Tag Manager and verify each one in GA4 and your ad platforms. Planning first keeps the setup clean and easy to maintain.
- Measurement plan. A written list of the actions that matter, what each one is called, and which details get recorded with it.
- Key events. Calls, form submissions, bookings, add-to-cart, checkout steps and purchases.
- Custom dimensions. Details like service type, city page, product category or lead source. For one ecommerce brand we tracked the full journey with more than 40 custom dimensions.
- Ad platform conversions. Clean conversion signals sent to Google Ads and Meta so their bidding learns from real outcomes.
- QA. Every tag is tested in preview mode and confirmed in live reports before we call it done.
What is consent mode and do I need it?
Consent mode tells Google tags whether a visitor agreed to analytics and advertising cookies, and adjusts what they collect. If you have visitors from regions with consent laws, or you run Google Ads to those regions, you likely need it.
We connect your cookie banner to consent mode, set sensible defaults, and test that tags behave correctly before and after a visitor chooses. We explain the tradeoff honestly: when people decline, you see less data, and Google fills some gaps with modeled estimates. Your legal requirements depend on your business and audience, so we recommend confirming your consent approach with your own counsel.
What goes into a Looker Studio dashboard?
A good dashboard answers the questions you ask every week on one screen. We build Looker Studio reports around those questions and leave out metrics nobody uses.
For a Houston-area home-services company we built SEO and paid-media reporting that compared organic and paid results year over year, with plain-English summaries for the owner. Typical views include:
- Leads and sales by channel, campaign and landing page.
- Cost per lead and return on ad spend.
- Organic search trends from Search Console.
- Year-over-year and month-over-month comparisons.
When data lives in several tools, we bring it together first with data engineering.
Where does analytics stop and attribution begin?
Analytics tells you what happened on your website. Attribution connects those visits to the revenue that came later, often in your CRM or on the phone.
Many businesses need both. A form fill in GA4 does not tell you whether that lead became, say, a $15,000 job. Once your analytics is reliable, marketing attribution links leads to closed revenue so you can judge channels by profit. It also feeds better testing for conversion rate optimization.
How is analytics work priced?
A one-time tracking audit or rebuild is handled by our Engineering team and quoted per project. Ongoing reporting and analysis is part of our monthly Growth program, which is scoped to your goals and quoted after a free audit.