Maryna Semidubarska
AuthorKey takeaways
A website audit is a structured review of how your site performs and how it is built.
It usually checks:
Different teams run different types of audits. An SEO consultant looks at content and indexation. A performance engineer focuses on load times. A tracking specialist checks analytics and tags.
In this article, we focus on tracking and analytics: how your website sends data to tools like GA4, Google Ads, and Meta through pixels, tags, and server-side tracking.
A tracking and analytics website audit is a review of how your website collects and sends data to analytics and ad platforms.
It answers questions like:
This type of audit looks at the full measurement flow: from the browser, through tools like Google Tag Manager, to analytics and ad platforms. For server-side tracking, it also checks how events go from the browser to a server Google Tag Manager container on a cloud server and then to platforms via APIs.
The goal is simple: see if your current tracking setup can support reliable reporting and better media decisions.
A tracking and analytics audit helps you understand how your website actually collects and sends information. It gives you a clear view of which events are recorded, which ones are missing, and how this affects reporting and ads. These are the main benefits you get from running this type of audit:
More reliable reporting
Tracking audits help you see gaps and double-counts in your data. Without this, specialists may trust numbers that are wrong, which may cost organizations a lot of money, and is a major problem for marketing data.
After an audit, you know which numbers are safe to use and which need fixing.
Less wasted ad budget
When events are missing or wrong, ad platforms cannot optimize well. A study by Forrester and Investis Digital found that marketing and advertising technologies not working well together lead to about 12% of ad budgets being wasted worldwide.
A tracking audit shows, for example, that:
You fix these issues, and platforms can use better signals to find customers, which helps your return on ad spend.
Clear view for decisions
Gartner found that marketing teams use analytics in only about 53% of their decisions, mostly because the data is hard to manage or incomplete.
With an audit in place, your team can answer:
This makes budget discussions more fact-based.
Better page speed and user experience
Tracking audits also look at how scripts affect performance. Some tags can be moved to server-side setups, which reduces the number of scripts running in the browser and can improve load times. Faster pages usually mean better UX and can support conversion rate.
Easier cooperation between marketing and tech
A good audit report is easy to share with developers, agencies, and business owners.
It describes:
This removes many misunderstandings between teams.
You can run tracking audits manually with browser consoles, network tabs, and long spreadsheets. But this takes time and requires technical skills. Website Tracking Checker by Stape gives you a faster and simpler way. It helps you analyze the tracking health of your website and provides insights on how to improve tracking quality for both web and server-side tracking.
Analytics: checks how tools like GA4 are set up on your site and how they send events from key pages.
Advertising: reviews how your setup sends events to Meta, Google Ads, and other ad platforms.
Cookies: audits cookie lifetime, consent mode configuration, and basic compliance with privacy rules.
SEO-impacting scripts: detects tracking scripts that slow your site and show which ones can move to server-side to reduce load on the browser.
Free, fast audit: you only enter a URL, and the scan usually takes up to two minutes.
Clear tracking score: you get one overall score plus separate scores by area, so you can see where to start.
Practical recommendations: the report gives concrete steps on how to make your tracking better.
Works for agencies and in-house teams: you can scan any publicly accessible URL, use the report as a checklist, and share it as a deliverable or pre-audit.
Measurable gains: after applying fixes from Stape's Website Tracking Checker, many setups can reach up to 40% more tracked conversions, 35% better data quality, and 20% faster page speed.
You can use this process on your own site or on a client site.
1. Define what you want to check
This helps you read the report with context.
2. Open Stape's Website Tracking Checker
You can scan as many publicly accessible URLs for free as you want.
3. Wait for the scan to complete
The audit usually takes up to two minutes. During this time, the Checker analyses:
When the report is ready, you will see an overall score and detailed sections.
4. Obtain the overall score
The overall score shows the general health of your tracking setup.
5. Go through each section
Use the detailed sections to plan your actions.
6. Fix issues with GTM and your platforms
After reading the report:
For complex changes or for clients with many sites, you can also consider Stape Care if you need expert help with implementation.
7. Rescan and compare
When changes are live:
You can keep using the Website Tracking Checker as a regular monitoring tool, for example, after big site releases or campaign launches.
These points are meant to go together with your Stape Website Tracking Checker report. Read the report first, then walk through the checklist and compare it with your current setup. It can help you see what already works, what needs a quick review, and what should be updated next.
Analytics and tracking audits and SEO audits often happen at the same time, but answer different questions.
Analytics and tracking audit: "Is our data collection correct and complete enough to support decisions and ad optimization?"
SEO website audit: "Can search engines crawl, index, and rank our pages, and is our content optimized for the right queries?"
Where they overlap:
SEO work brings traffic. Tracking and analytics reports show what this traffic does and how it converts.
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