GA4 hides operational problems

GA4 reports sessions, events, and conversions. What it doesn't report is why your business isn't working.

The common assumption is that analytics platforms reveal problems. In practice, they obscure them. GA4 was built to track user behaviour across surfaces. It was not built to diagnose operational bottlenecks in ecommerce systems.

Here's what actually happens.

A product page has a 1.2% conversion rate. The team assumes the page needs optimisation. They test headlines, imagery, layout. Nothing moves meaningfully.

The actual cause is that 68% of the traffic to that page comes from a category filter combination that returns irrelevant results. The page itself is fine. The navigation path feeding it is broken.

GA4 shows the symptom — low conversion — but doesn't expose the topology of the problem. It treats every session as independent. It doesn't model how internal linking, filter logic, and search behaviour create traffic distributions that determine commercial outcomes before the user even reaches the product.

Most ecommerce teams spend weeks optimising pages that aren't broken. They're optimising the wrong layer because the instrumentation points them there.

The stores that make better decisions typically supplement GA4 with server-side event logging that captures the request chain — not just the destination. The difference is between knowing what happened and understanding why it happened.

Analytics should inform architecture decisions, not just marketing ones. In most stores, it does neither.