Google Analytics Not Working? Run This Check

Olamide Sule, founder of Dolphin Analytics: a digital analytics expert based in London delivering solutions for agency and in-house clients.

Google Analytics showing zero users on a morning that should be busy sends most people straight to a search box to ask whether the service is down. It almost never is. Dolphin Analytics sets up and fixes GA4 tracking for agencies and in-house teams every week, and the same first step sorts nearly every case: work out whether the problem sits with Google or with your own setup, before you change a single setting.

Is Google Analytics actually down, or is it just your setup?

Google Analytics is rarely down. Google runs a public Analytics service status dashboard, and real outages are short and product-wide, not “my site stopped tracking on Tuesday.” If that status page shows no incident and only your data looks wrong, the fault is in your own tracking, not Google’s servers.

That matters because half the pages ranking for “Google Analytics not working” answer a different question. Downdetector and isitdownrightnow tell you whether other people are reporting problems, which is useful for a genuine outage and useless for a broken tag. Those pages aggregate user reports, so they light up whenever enough people are confused at once. Start with Google’s own status page instead: green there means the next step is yours.

What is the 60-second check for whether it’s GA4 or your tag?

The fastest way to split “GA4 is down” from “my tag is broken” is the Realtime report. Open Reports > Realtime in GA4, then load your own website in another tab and click around a few pages. Within about 30 seconds you should see yourself appear as an active user.

• You appear in Realtime: the tag fires and GA4 is collecting data. Your problem is in reporting, filters or processing delay, covered further down.
• You don’t appear in Realtime: the tag is missing, broken, or pointing at the wrong property. That is a collection problem, and no report setting will fix it.

This one check answers the “Realtime not working” searches too. An empty Realtime report is not GA4 failing; it is the clearest sign your tag isn’t sending hits from the page you’re looking at.

Why is Google Analytics showing no data at all?

A property with no data almost always means the tag never fired. Three causes account for most cases:

1. The GA4 tag isn’t on the page. A theme update, a migration, or a developer removing “unused” code can strip the tag out. View the page source or use the Tag Assistant extension to confirm the tag actually loads.
2. The wrong Measurement ID. Hits are firing, just into a different property. Check the ID on the site (it starts with G-) against the one in Admin > Data Streams. A leftover ID from a staging site or an old rebuild is a frequent culprit.
3. A Google Tag Manager container that was never published. Edits in GTM do nothing until you hit Publish. A tag that works in Preview but not on the live site is usually an unpublished container.

Google’s own tag setup troubleshooting guide walks through confirming installation, and DebugView (below) shows you exactly what a page fires in real time.

Why does Realtime work but your reports show nothing?

If you appear in Realtime but standard reports look empty, the tag is fine and the problem is on the reporting side. Two things catch people most:

Processing delay. Realtime is instant, but standard GA4 reports take time to finish processing, so hits from the last day can lag by up to 24 to 48 hours. If you’re checking a report an hour after install, give it time before assuming it’s broken.

Filters and date range. Check the report’s date range first, since a default that predates your install shows nothing. Then check Admin > Data Settings > Data Filters and any internal traffic filter. A filter meant to exclude the office IP can be set too broadly, or a developer filter can sit in “testing” and quietly drop the traffic you’re trying to see.

Why is your GA4 event tracking not working?

Event tracking breaks in one of three ways, and DebugView tells them apart. Open Admin > DebugView, walk through the journey yourself with debug mode on, and watch what lands:

• The event never fires. No event in DebugView means the trigger is wrong: a button selector changed, a form ID moved, or the GTM trigger points at the wrong element.
• The event fires but parameters are missing. The event lands, but value, currency or a custom parameter is empty, so the report looks blank or wrong.
• The event fires but isn’t a key event. Page views and custom events show up, but conversions look untracked because the event was never marked as a key event in Admin > Events.

Conversions have their own set of causes, from Consent Mode to the GCLID not passing between Google Ads and GA4. If it’s specifically conversions or Google Ads goals that stopped, the fixes in Google Analytics not tracking conversions go deeper than this page does. The same event checks explain missing page views: if page_view doesn’t land in DebugView, the tag isn’t firing on that page at all.

Why is GA4 DebugView not working?

DebugView showing nothing is usually not a fault: it only displays sessions flagged for debugging, never all traffic. If you open it expecting your live visitors, you’ll see an empty stream and assume it’s broken.

Turn debug mode on first. Use the Google Analytics Debugger Chrome extension, run GTM in Preview mode, or send a debug_mode parameter on the GA4 config tag. Reload the site with one of those active and your own session appears in DebugView within seconds. If events still don’t show once debug mode is genuinely on, then the tag isn’t firing on that page, and you’re back to the no-data checks above.

What if the numbers work but look wrong?

Sometimes GA4 is tracking fine and the numbers just don’t match another source. That is often normal, not a fault. GA4 undercounts Shopify orders by roughly 10 to 15% because of consent-blocked sessions, ad blockers, refunds and hits that never arrive; a gap in that range is worth understanding, not fixing. A much larger gap, or a discrepancy that appeared right after a site change, is a real tracking fault.

Consent is the most common reason data looks thinner than it should. If a cookie banner defaults analytics storage to denied and Consent Mode isn’t set up to model the gap, you lose a chunk of EU and UK traffic silently. Our walkthrough on cookie consent blocking Google Analytics covers how to recover it. For a full pass over a property that looks off, the GA4 audit checklist runs the same checks in order.

Still not sure if it’s your tag or Google?

If you’ve run the Realtime check and still can’t tell whether the tag is even loading, scan the page. Sonar checks what tracking actually fires on a URL, so you get a plain answer on whether the GA4 tag, GTM and consent setup are present and firing, without reading code.

If the scan shows the tag missing, misfiring, or blocked by consent, that’s a fixable setup problem, and it’s exactly what the free audit is built to catch. You bring the URL; we tell you which of the faults above is actually breaking your data, and what it takes to fix it.