GA4 not tracking conversions: what it usually is, by the numbers
Zero conversions in GA4 almost never means zero conversions happened. It means one link in the chain from your site to the report broke, and the chain breaks in a handful of known places. We run this diagnosis constantly: our scanner has audited the measurement layer of 936 live sites recently, so instead of a generic checklist, here is how often each cause actually turns out to be the culprit.
This page is triage. It tells you which failure your site probably has. A free scan tells you which one it actually has, checked against your live site, priced in dollars, with the fix shipped as a pull request you review.
What we actually find, ranked by frequency
| What's broken | How often we find it |
|---|---|
| No working GA4 on the site at all | 37% of sites |
| Consent setup dropping conversion data | 28% of sites |
| Duplicate tracking corrupting the counts | 20% of sites |
| Two or more GA4 properties collecting at once | 20% of sites that have GA4 |
Those numbers deserve a beat. More than a third of the sites we audit, live businesses spending on traffic, have no functioning GA4 at all. And among sites where it is installed, one in five is running two properties simultaneously, which means somebody is looking at the wrong one, or both, and neither is the truth.
Cause 1: it was never really installed
The owner believes analytics exists because a tag appears in the page source. The tag is a dead Universal Analytics ID (shut off in 2023), or a Tag Manager container that was created but never published, or a snippet on the desktop theme that the mobile theme lost in a redesign. The tell: open Realtime and visit your own site; if Realtime cannot see you, nothing else matters and every downstream question is moot.
Cause 2: consent is eating the conversions
28% of sites we audit are failing consent-mode transmission: the banner or its configuration drops events before they are recorded. The cruelest version defaults every visitor to denied, including the large majority who never touch the banner, in US markets where opt-out rules made that sacrifice unnecessary. The tell: traffic looks roughly normal, conversions crater, and the drop dates precisely to the day the banner shipped.
Cause 3: the event fires but was never made to count
GA4 splits "an event happened" from "this event is a conversion" (key events, renamed from conversions in 2024). An event that fires beautifully but is not marked as a key event counts nothing, forever. The near-identical sibling: the event was renamed in a refactor and the key-event definition still points at the old name. The tell: DebugView shows the event arriving while the conversion reports stay at zero. This one our scanner cannot see from outside, but it is the most common cause we find once a tag is confirmed alive, and it is pure configuration, no code.
Cause 4: it counts, into the wrong property, or twice
Sites accumulate measurement IDs the way attics accumulate boxes: an old agency's property, a founder's test property, a plugin that installed its own. One in five GA4 sites we scan runs more than one property at once. Related and worse: duplicate tags into the same property, which counts every sale twice, doubles conversion rate, and silently corrupts every decision made downstream. The tell for that one is flattering numbers that no other system agrees with.
Why this class of bug survives so long
Tracking failure is silent by design. Nothing errors, nobody is paged, and the site keeps selling. The dashboard just goes wrong, in either direction, and stays wrong until a human compares it against another source of truth. That is the actual lesson of the 936-site dataset: these are not exotic failures, they are the default state of sites nobody has audited.
You can hand this page to your developer, or paste your symptoms into an AI assistant and get walked through the menus. Both work for the fixing. What neither can tell you is which of these your site has right now, and what it is costing you while it stays broken. That is a measurement question, and it takes measuring.
Mimetic scans your site free, checks the full chain from tag to key event to consent against your live traffic, and ships each fix as a pull request you review and merge. Related: conversion tracking setup that survives, Google Ads showing zero conversions.