Case study

Using GA4 to Diagnose Drops in Web Site Traffic

The client contacted Data Disciples on Slack after observing a sudden decrease in traffic to its student athletic support website. Not understanding the cause of the site traffic drop and concerned there may be an issue with the Google Analytics 4 reporting or Google Tag Manager tracking, the client requested an audit of their site's analytics.

• A Division I University's Student Athletic Support Team
• Google Analytics 4
• Looker Studio

Challenge

The client contacted Data Disciples on Slack after observing a sudden decrease in traffic to its student athletic support website. Not understanding the cause of the site traffic drop and concerned there may be an issue with the Google Analytics 4 reporting or Google Tag Manager tracking, the client requested an audit of their site's analytics.

Solution

The first step to diagnosing the cause of the drop in site traffic was to identify whether the decrease is isolated to one marketing channel or observed across all channels generally. If a drop in site traffic is uniform across all marketing channels, an analyst may suspect there is an issue in the site's Google Analytics 4 or Google Tag Manager instrumentation. If the site traffic can be isolated to one marketing channel, then the next step is to investigate that channel more closely. In this case, the Data Disciples team used Looker Studio to visualize site traffic broken down by marketing channel, isolating the drop in site traffic to the referral channel, and specifically, to one influencer's Instagram page.

Result

The client received our report less than thirty minutes after first reaching out to the Data Disciples Business Intelligence Team on our client-integrated Slack channel. With the lead we provided, the client was able to chat with their social media team and confirm indeed a popular influencer the client had contracted with recently unlinked the client's site from their Instagram profile description. Because the client had a retainer with Data Disciples, they were able to quickly engage us to diagnose the drop in site traffic quickly and efficiently.