Blog Playbooks · What You Missed: Oct 26 to Nov 1, 2026 · Part 5
Your analytics may be missing your holiday sales. Check before you change budgets.
An audit of eight online stores found Google Analytics 4 losing track of orders right through last year's holidays, while the stores' own records kept counting. Here is the check to run this week.
Your sales were up last December. Your analytics said they were down. Which one do you believe when you set the budget for this December?
A new audit says plenty of businesses got it wrong last year, and the ad platforms got it wrong with them.
What happened
On October 28, Search Engine Journal published an audit by Christian Goodrich, head of organic search at the agency SOZO. He compared Google Analytics 4 with the actual store orders at eight U.K. online stores, for the holiday quarter of 2024 and of 2025. His agency has worked with all eight brands, and six let him match GA4 against their own order records.
In the worst cases, the gaps were large.
Retailer A. GA4 recorded 81% of the store's web orders in Q4 2024 and 41% in Q4 2025. Between Christmas Day 2025 and January 4, 2026, GA4 said revenue was down 68% a day on the year before. The store's own records showed a 13% fall. Over the quarter, its web orders actually rose from 5,874 to 7,686, while GA4 showed them falling by a third.
Retailer B. GA4 recorded 94% of orders in Q4 2024 and 36% in Q4 2025. It showed revenue down 69% while net sales rose 18.5%.
Retailer C. From October 28 to December 4, 2025, the store recorded 2,215 orders, and GA4 recorded no purchases at all. Then on December 9, GA4 logged 1,261 orders in a single day, all but five of them filed under "Unassigned," so nobody could tell which channel earned them.
The cause at Retailers A and B was ordinary. Their cookie consent tools came on plans that, in Goodrich's words, "covered a set number of page views a month," and "once they ran out, the banner stopped showing until the next billing date." In the Black Friday billing cycle, Retailer A's allowance ran out on December 1 and GA4 did not recover until December 15. That is the busiest stretch of the year.
Source: Search Engine Journal, Oct 28
What it means for your business
This is not only an online-store problem. If you run a gym that sells memberships online, a med spa that takes bookings, a dental office with a new-patient form or a home service company with a quote request, the same chain applies. Your analytics counts what it can see. Your ad platforms learn from what gets counted.
At Retailer A, GA4 showed Google Ads return on spend falling from 8.07 to 4.79. An attribution tool matched to real store orders showed it rising from 4.42 to 7.93, on 20% less spend. Read GA4 alone, and you cut the campaign that was working best.
And there was an early warning. During Retailer C's blackout, Google Search Console showed 4,244 clicks in the week of November 3, while GA4 recorded 57 Google organic sessions. The clicks never stopped. The counting did.
Goodrich's conclusion is fair to the tool: "GA4 is still the best free tool most ecommerce teams have for understanding behavior, but it isn't a record of sales."
Your analytics is a witness. The register is the record. When they disagree in December, believe the register.
What your analytics said (Retailer A)
Q4 web orders falling by a third. Google Ads return on spend dropping from 8.07 to 4.79. Holiday revenue down 68% a day.
What the store records said
Q4 web orders rising from 5,874 to 7,686. Google Ads return rising from 4.42 to 7.93 on less spend. Holiday revenue down 13%.
What to do this week
This check takes two numbers side by side, and no new tool.
- Put the real count next to analytics
Pull your real orders, bookings, signups or leads for the last four weeks from the system that takes the money or the appointment. Put them next to what your analytics reports for the same weeks, week by week.
- Divide, and look at the pattern
Goodrich's warning signs: a sudden step down, a week near zero, or a week above 100%, which can mean double counting. For leads and bookings, our own rule of thumb is that a gap over 10% gets fixed before anyone touches a budget. The 10% is ours, not the article's.
- Ask about your cookie banner's limits
Ask whoever runs your website whether your consent banner has a monthly page-view cap, and what happens when it runs out. If holiday traffic could use it up, raise the plan before December, not after.
- Compare Search Console clicks with analytics sessions
If Search Console clicks hold steady and analytics sessions from Google suddenly drop, the problem is the counting, not your customers.
- Check again after every site change
A new checkout, a new booking widget or a theme update can break tracking quietly. Run step 1 the week after any change.
Running several locations? Do the comparison for each one. One broken booking page can hide behind a healthy total.
If you are about to judge your Google campaigns on return on ad spend, pair this with knowing your break-even ROAS. That number is only useful if the sales behind it are real.
This is part of What You Missed, our weekly read on the marketing news that matters to business owners. See the full week: /blog/what-you-missed-week-of-october-26-2026
Sources
- Search Engine Journal, "GA4 Missed 66% Of One Retailer's Holiday Orders," Christian Goodrich, October 28, 2026 (headline shortened). searchenginejournal.com
