You check your analytics — one number. Open your CRM — another. Panic. Confusion. Existential crisis. “Who’s lying? Where’s the money?”
Been there. And if you work with data, I bet you have too.
Why does this happen?
Because analytics tools weren’t built to track actual sales. They track interactions — clicks, views, form submissions. If they’re off by a few percent, who cares? It’s just people looking at product pages.
But purchases, signups, and qualified leads? That’s serious business. Even a 1% error can lead to terrible decisions. That’s why this data needs to be rock solid—stored in your database or regularly exported from your CRM.
So no, GA4, Shopify or ad platforms aren’t hiding your sales. They just weren’t designed to track them properly.
What are we doing wrong?
Every time we try to figure out why conversions don’t match sales, we’re basically expecting analytics tools to do things they weren’t built for. Like trying to make a toaster cook a steak.
Instead of stuffing CRM data into GA4, we should be using GA4 to enrich our business analytics — not the other way around.
What can you do?
1. Make your CRM/ERP the single source of truth.
2. Track actual sales from the source, not just what an analytics tool thinks happened.
3. Send key conversions to analytics tools and ad platforms from the backend.
4. Accept that analytics conversions exist mostly to optimize ad algorithms, not to be the gospel truth.
If you work with GA4 to BigQuery exports, be sure to check out my SQL cheat sheet.
