GA / GTM Scripts

Why it matters

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager tags are added once during site setup and then rarely touched. This creates a false sense of security. Theme updates, CMS migrations, A/B testing platform rollouts, and lazy-loaded script managers can all strip or suppress these tags without raising an obvious error.

A site can continue functioning normally, serving pages with no tracking in place. Organic traffic, paid campaigns, email attribution — all of it drops from your records without warning. By the time anyone notices a gap in reports, weeks of data may already be missing.

The secondary risk is tag duplication. A migration that adds new tags without removing old ones results in double-counting. Conversion metrics overstate performance. Both problems affect the decisions you make from that data.

How we check it

We execute JavaScript in the rendered page to identify the GA measurement ID (UA-XXXXXX or G-XXXXXX) and the GTM container ID (GTM-XXXXX) present on the page. We capture all instances found.

If the set of IDs changes between crawls — a tag disappears, a new one appears, or the ID changes to a different account — we flag it with before/after values. Because losing tracking is worse than an unnecessary alert, this check fires on any change, including additions.

What to watch for

Losing a GA tag entirely is the most damaging outcome. Check your tag manager container and CMS theme settings. If GTM is still present but GA is missing from the page, check whether the GA tag inside GTM has been paused or deleted — that is a different failure path to the tag disappearing from the HTML.