Most measurement projects start in the wrong place: with the tool. Someone decides GA4 needs “setting up properly,” a developer implements a fairly generic tagging plan, and six months later nobody trusts the numbers — because nobody agreed what the numbers were supposed to answer in the first place.
Start with the decision, not the dashboard
Before any tag fires, it’s worth asking a much simpler question: what decision is this data going to inform? If you can’t answer that, the tracking — however technically correct — won’t get used.
That’s the order we work in: understand the business, define the goals, translate those into a handful of real KPIs, and only then design what needs to be measured. GA4 and GTM show up at step five, not step one.
What this looks like in practice
In practice it means fewer events, fewer custom dimensions, and a much shorter list of “things we track” — but every one of them ties back to a decision someone in the business actually needs to make.