As SEO professionals, we’re data-driven. So, it’s ironic that we need to ask a counterintuitive question: “Where are the missing bullet holes in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?”
Most of us trust the event-based data that GA4 collects. But we should use other tools and techniques to independently verify our analysis and interpretation of this data.
Why?
I just looked at data in the GA4 demo account of the Google Merchandise Store, and 46,811 of the 68,976 total users over the last 28 days were acquired from the direct channel.
This means 67.9% of users arrived at the site “via a saved link or by entering your URL.”
Screenshot from Google Analytics, January 2025
If you think the Google Merchandise Store’s data is an anomaly because it’s from the GA4 demo account, then check your own data.
I did, and 57.6% of my total users arrived through the direct channel. So, your mileage may vary, but there are probably more users than you can shake a stick at.
More importantly, the Google Merchandise Store’s business goal is to sell a variety of Google merchandise, including apparel, accessories, lifestyle products, stationery, and collectibles.
How would you analyze and interpret GA4’s data to determine which marketing efforts were effective?
You could use GA4 to understand how users progress through the online shopping cart. If you notice that users have trouble with a particular step, then you could use conversion rate optimization (CRO) to make changes on the store’s website to resolve the problem.
You would analyze and interpret customer engagement data from the middle and lower parts of the so-called sales funnel.
If I were the owner of a brick-and-mortar store, I’d realize that I’m focusing all my attention on which aisles people walk down and which items they bring to the cash register.
But I still don’t have a clue where they heard about my shop before they walked through the door.
In other words, GA4 gives us less than a third of the data we need to know about user acquisition: The initial stage of building business awareness and acquiring user interest.
Somehow, we’ve missed what GA4 can’t – or doesn’t – tell us about the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT): the moment in the purchase process when the consumer or business buyer researches a product or service prior to visiting your website.
The Missing Bullet Holes
Why haven’t we spotted this misalignment before? Well, let me share a story.
My father was a sergeant in the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) during World War II.
When I started conducting market research in the mid-1980s – when he was the director of marketing at Oldsmobile, and I was the director of corporate communications at Lotus Development Corporation – he told me a story that has since been retold in “Abraham Wald and the Missing Bullet Holes,” which is an excerpt from How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg.
During World War II, officers in the USAAC asked Abraham Wald, one of the smartest statisticians in the Statistical Research Group (SRG), to analyze some classified data.
When American bombers came back from missions over Europe, they were covered in bullet holes.
“But the damage wasn’t uniformly distributed across the aircraft,” Ellenberg notes. “There were more bullet holes in the fuselage, not so many in the engines.”
Wald recognized that the planes that came back were not a random sample of all the planes that had been sent on bombing missions, and he also realized the damage should have been spread equally among all the bombers.
So, he asked, “Where are the missing holes?” Ellenberg explains, “The reason planes were coming back with fewer hits to the engine is that planes that got hit in the engine weren’t coming back.”
The Missing Holes In User Acquisition
Digital marketers are in an analogous situation. GA4 provides us with so much event-based data that we’ve failed to spot the missing holes in user acquisition.
So, now that we realize that we don’t have a clue about where the lion’s share of our audience discovered our brand or product before visiting our website, what should we do?
We should conduct some audience research that can tell us:
Who are they? (Demographics: age, gender, location, job, and income).
What do they do? (Behavior: how they shop, what they search for online).
Where do they hang out? (Platforms: social media, websites, communities).
What matters to them? (Needs and Interests: their problems, desires, and what they talk about).
Are there any audience research tools that can help us? Yes, they include: