You’ve Set Up Website Tracking—Now What?

Digital Marketing / March 17, 2025

So, you’ve done the hard part. Your website tracking is in place, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is firing correctly, and you can see real-time data coming in. Your conversions are tracking, and everything looks… well, functional. 🎉

But now comes the part no one really talks about: what do you actually do with all this data?

Because let’s be honest—having tracking set up is like having a gym membership. Just because you have access to the equipment doesn’t mean you’re getting results. The real work starts when you put that data to use, optimizing your marketing efforts and making sure every dollar you spend is working as hard as possible.

So, what’s next? Here’s where you should focus.

1. Validate Your Data (Again) 

Look, I get it. You just finished setting up tracking, and the last thing you want to do is double-check your work. But trust me, this step saves you from some truly painful mistakes later.

Tracking can (and will) break in all kinds of creative ways. Maybe a new site update knocked something loose. Maybe your Meta Pixel is counting duplicate conversions. Maybe your UTM parameters are a complete disaster, and your “Google Ads” traffic is mysteriously showing up under “Direct.”

And while we’re on the topic of mismatches, let’s get one thing straight: the chances of your advertising platform data, CRM data, and Google Analytics data matching perfectly? 0%.

This isn’t a bug—it’s just how digital marketing works. Different platforms measure things differently. Google Ads and Meta track clicks and view-through conversions (meaning someone might not have even clicked but still got counted). Your CRM only logs actual leads or sales after someone fills out a form or makes a purchase. Google Analytics? It’s session-based and relies on cookie tracking, which can easily be blocked, expire, or lose attribution between sessions.

This means that if you’re expecting your Google Ads, GA4, and CRM to tell the exact same story, you’re going to be very frustrated. The goal isn’t perfect alignment—it’s understanding the discrepancies so you can make informed decisions.

Before you start making big marketing moves based on this data, do a sanity check:

1. Open GA4 DebugView and Google Tag Assistant. Are your events actually firing as expected?
2. Cross-check your GA4 conversions against actual sales or lead submissions. If your reports show 500 form submissions but your sales team only got 12 emails, something is off.
3. Look at your UTM parameters. Are they clean and consistent, or are they a free-for-all with “facebook,” “Facebook,” and “FB” all showing up as different traffic sources?

And, hey, if you want tracking experts to take a look, contact us here, and we’ll help!

2. Get Serious with Your Data: ETL and a Data Warehouse

Okay, let’s say your data is accurate. Now you’ve got another problem—it’s everywhere. Some of it’s in GA4, some is in your CRM, some in Meta Ads, some in a spreadsheet your team manually updates every week. That’s where ETL—Extract, Transform, Load—comes in.

ETL is the process of pulling all your data from different sources, cleaning it up, and organizing it in one place: a data warehouse. 

A data warehouse is like a brain for your marketing analytics. Instead of hopping between GA4, your ad platforms, your CRM, and that sad little spreadsheet, you have one central place where everything connects.

If your business is growing and you’re tracking performance across multiple channels, a warehouse is a game-changer. It ensures your data is:

• Consistent – No more mismatched numbers across platforms.
• Accessible – Your team isn’t wasting time pulling manual reports.
• Scalable – You can actually analyze trends across different data sources, rather than just looking at individual reports in isolation.

Tools like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and Amazon Redshift are great for this, but even if you’re not ready for that level of commitment, automating data pipelines with Funnel or Fivetran can make a huge difference, especially for small businesses, at low cost.

3. Activate Your Data

Having clean, centralized data is great—but if you’re not using it to improve your marketing, what’s the point? Customer data activation is about taking insights from your data warehouse / Data pipeline and pushing them back into your marketing platforms to drive better results.

What does that look like in real life?

• Sending high-value customer segments from your warehouse to Google Ads for smarter targeting.
• Retargeting users who spent 5+ minutes on your site but never added to cart—not just generic site visitors.
• Syncing CRM data with your ad platforms to exclude existing customers and avoid wasted ad spend.

This is how the best marketers outperform their competition—they don’t just look at data; they use it to optimize every touchpoint.

4. Build Dashboards That Actually Make Sense

By now, your data is accurate, structured, and activated across your marketing channels. But how do you see it all in one place without jumping between ten different tools?

That’s where a marketing dashboard comes in.

At Bloom, we use Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) because it’s flexible, integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics and Google Ads, and—most importantly—lets us create dashboards that actually help make decisions. A good dashboard isn’t just a pile of metrics; it’s a clear, actionable view of what’s working and what’s not.

The key to a great dashboard is simplicity—tracking the right KPIs instead of drowning in vanity metrics. It should be easy to read at a glance, with logical layouts and clear visualizations. It also needs to be dynamic, allowing us to drill down into specific campaigns or audiences without starting from scratch.

Ultimately, a dashboard should do more than display data—it should help optimize performance in real-time. If you’re looking at numbers but still unsure what to do next, your dashboard isn’t working for you. When built right, it becomes the control center of your marketing strategy—helping you make smarter, faster decisions.

Need Help Making Sense of Your Data?

If all of this sounds great but also like a lot of work, you’re not wrong. Building a strong data pipeline, setting up a warehouse, and activating insights takes time and expertise—but the payoff is game-changing.

If you need help getting there, we’ve got you covered. Whether it’s setting up tracking, cleaning up your data, or building dashboards that actually make sense, we’ll make sure your marketing isn’t just data-driven—it’s data-powered.

Let’s chat. Because tracking is just the first step—the real work starts now.