Use these steps as a working checklist and adapt them to the project’s evidence, scope, and constraints.
Practical steps
- Start with a decision: keep, investigate, fix, or test. Compare the same property, search type, countries, devices, landing pages, and equal date ranges; annotate seasonality, holidays, campaigns, and release dates.
- Trace the funnel in separate systems: Search Console reports Google Search impressions and clicks; GA4 reports measured sessions, landing pages, and configured events; the CRM is the source of truth for submitted, contacted, and qualified leads. These counts have different definitions and will not match one to one.
- If clicks do not become sessions, check date/time zones, landing URLs and redirects, consent and tag coverage, page load failures, and campaign parameters. Compare the same URL and dates; Search Console property totals can differ from page totals because its aggregation rules differ.
- Audit lead tracking before judging conversion: test a successful form submission, not only the button click; submit once and check for duplicates; verify phone and messenger paths separately. In Tag Assistant/DebugView, confirm the expected event fires once with the right page and parameters. Repeat after consent choices where applicable.
- Join GA4 and CRM only with a documented, privacy-appropriate identifier and consistent dates. Label stages explicitly: tracked key event → CRM submission → contacted lead → CRM-qualified lead → customer. A key event is not automatically a real lead, qualification, or sale. Calculate lead-to-customer rate from the same cohort and state its denominator.
- Diagnose a traffic change by segment before naming a cause: compare seasonality and weekday mix, then pages, queries, devices/countries, and release dates. Find where the change concentrates; inspect that page/query or release, verify tracking, and write one testable explanation with an owner and recheck date.
- Make the monthly report one page: outcome and decision; Search Console visibility/clicks; GA4 landing sessions/verified key events; CRM submissions/qualified leads/customers; largest segment changes; tracking caveat; next action, owner, and due date. Do not turn correlation or attributed revenue into proven SEO causation.
Primary sources
- Google Analytics Help · Engagement rate and engaged sessions
- Customize detail reports
- User acquisition and traffic acquisition reports
- Link Search Console and Google Analytics
- Landing page report
- Traffic-source dimension scopes
- Organic Google Search traffic report
- GA4 traffic-source scopes
- GA4 default channel groups and Unassigned
- GA4 DebugView
- GA4 key events
- Search Console property and page aggregation