GA4 missed two-thirds of one retailer's holiday orders. Here's how to spot missing orders in GA4 and check your tracking before peak season.

Few things waste a boardroom meeting like defending Google Analytics 4 figures that don’t align with the store-reported numbers. It erodes trust and leaves everyone with an incomplete, misleading picture, and over the past 12 months I’ve found it harder to get GA4 to do the job it’s set up for. It’s challenged me and my team to keep a much closer check, with alerts on the tracking we rely on to judge success.

So, ahead of this year’s holiday season, I audited GA4 at eight U.K. ecommerce brands, putting its Q4 numbers for 2024 and 2025 next to store orders. I expected gaps, but not ones this big, or this well hidden.

Between Christmas Day 2025 and Jan. 4, 2026, GA4 told a U.K. retailer its revenue was down 68% a day on the year before. The retailer’s own order records showed a fall of 13%.

GA4 recorded 81% of the store’s web orders in Q4 2024, 41% in Q4 2025 and just 32% over the Christmas period.

Six of the eight stores let me match GA4 to their own order records. At three, GA4 told a very different story. At two, the cookie banner had been switching itself off for days or weeks at a time, and GA4 gave no sign anything was missing. At the third, GA4 recorded no purchases for five weeks, then loaded them in late and counted hundreds twice.

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