The first hour with an account you have inherited

Taking over an existing analytics and ads setup, the temptation is to start analysing. Do these nine things first, because every subsequent conclusion depends on them.

1. Data retention

GA4 property settings. If it is on the two-month default, change it to fourteen now. You cannot recover what has already expired, but you can stop the bleeding this minute.

2. Timezone and currency

Wrong timezone shifts every daily number and makes reconciliation with Ads impossible. Wrong currency silently misstates revenue. Neither is retroactively fixable.

3. How many properties are firing

View source and check the container. Two GA4 properties on one page means two versions of the truth, and whichever one is feeding Ads conversions is the one steering the money.

4. Internal traffic filters

Defined and activated. A filter in testing state does nothing and looks configured.

5. Unwanted referrals

Payment providers, booking platforms, your own subdomains. Absent, your best-converting channel is attributed to a payment gateway.

6. Which key events exist, and whether they fire

Open the events report for the last 30 days. Anything marked as a key event with zero occurrences is either broken or should not be marked. Anything firing thousands of times is probably a page view masquerading as a conversion.

7. What Ads is importing

The conversion actions list, and specifically the "include in bidding" column. This is what the money is being spent to achieve. It is regularly not what anyone assumed.

8. Whether the numbers agree with reality

Take one week. Compare GA4 key events, Ads conversions, and whatever the business actually counts — orders, enquiries in the inbox, CRM entries. You are not looking for equality; you are looking for the size and direction of the gap.

A 3x discrepancy is a finding. A 10% one is normal.

9. What is being deleted right now

Search Console holds sixteen months and deletes silently. If nobody is archiving it, the history is evaporating while you read this, and today is the earliest you can possibly start.

Then, and only then

Start analysing. Every hour spent on analysis before this list is an hour spent building on numbers you have not verified — and the most expensive kind of wrong is confident and well-presented.