What is Not Provided in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is incredibly powerful for understanding what is happening on your website, but it often struggles to explain why. It's a goldmine of quantitative data, showing you how many visitors arrived, which pages they viewed, and how long they stayed. This article covers the crucial data and insights you simply won't find inside Google Analytics and shows you where to find them to get a complete picture of your business performance.

Why Are Users Behaving That Way? The Missing Qualitative Data

The number one limitation of Google Analytics is its lack of qualitative insight. It can tell you that 70% of users leave your pricing page without signing up, but it can't tell you if it's because your pricing is confusing, a button is broken on mobile, or your key benefit isn't clear.

GA reports on the outcome (the "what") but leaves you guessing about the cause (the "why"). To understand the user-level experience, you need to turn to tools that capture qualitative behavioral data.

Heatmaps and Session Recordings

While GA aggregates data into reports, heatmap and session recording tools show you exactly how individual, anonymous users interact with your website. They're the closest you can get to looking over a user's shoulder as they browse.

• Heatmaps provide visual overlays on your pages, showing you where users click, how far they scroll, and where their mouse moves. This helps identify which elements on a page are grabbing attention and which are being ignored.
• Session recordings are video playbacks of actual user sessions. You can watch as someone navigates through your site, encountering friction points, getting confused by your navigation, or "rage-clicking" on an element they expect to be clickable.

Example in action: You notice in GA4 that the conversion rate on your newly designed checkout page has dropped by 20%. The data shows a high exit rate, but it doesn't explain the problem. By watching a few session recordings in a tool like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity, you discover that the "Apply Coupon Code" field is partially hidden on most mobile devices, causing users to get frustrated and abandon their carts. GA identified the problem area, a session recording pinpointed the exact cause.

User Surveys and Feedback Forms

Sometimes, the easiest way to find out why users do what they do is to simply ask them. Direct user feedback is a source of truth that quantitative data can never replace. Instead of interpreting numbers, you get plain-language answers straight from your audience.

You can implement simple, unobtrusive surveys to capture feedback at critical points in the user journey:

• On-page pop-up surveys: Ask visitors leaving a key page, "What was the main thing that stopped you from signing up today?"
• Post-purchase surveys: Ask customers, "How did you first hear about us?" to uncover marketing channels GA might have misattributed.
• Exit-intent surveys: When a user moves to close the tab, you can ask a simple question like, "What information were you looking for but couldn't find?"

Example in action: GA shows high traffic to a blog post about one of your product's key features, but very few readers click through to the product page. You add a small feedback widget asking, "Was this article helpful?" with a comment box. The responses reveal that while users find the article informative, they don't understand how the feature solves their specific problem. This feedback tells you the content needs to be rewritten to focus more on benefits and use cases, a conclusion you'd never reach from GA data alone.

The Full Customer Journey: Connecting All the Dots

Google Analytics is centered almost entirely around what happens on your website. But the real customer journey is messy and starts long before a user lands on your site - and often continues long after they leave.

Detailed Ad Campaign Performance (Revenue and ROI)

GA can track clicks and conversions from ad platforms like Facebook or Google Ads, especially when using UTM parameters. However, it provides a very incomplete view of your advertising performance. Critically, it does not natively track:

• Ad Spend: GA shows you that a Facebook ad campaign generated $2,000 in revenue, but it doesn't know that you spent $1,500 to get it. Out-of-the-box, it cannot calculate true ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) without manual data imports.
• Impressions and View-through Conversions: Users often see an ad, don’t click, but visit your site later to convert. This is known as a view-through conversion, and ad platforms are much better at tracking this influence than Google Analytics.
• Creative-Level Performance: Facebook Ads Manager will show you exactly which ad variation (image, video, copy) is performing best. This level of granularity is lost once the data gets into GA.

To truly understand ad performance, you have to analyze data from both Google Analytics and the native ad platforms themselves. Piecing them together is the only way to know which campaigns actually are profitable.

CRM and Sales Pipeline Data

For B2B or lead-gen businesses, an even bigger black hole exists after a user fills out a form. Google Analytics can track that a lead form was submitted - a "conversion" - but its visibility ends there. GA has no idea what happens to that lead next.

It cannot answer critical business questions like:

• Did that lead turn into a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?
• Did the sales team ever contact them?
• Did that lead eventually close into a deal worth $100 or $100,000?
• What is the average lead-to-close revenue based on the original traffic source?

This is where your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, like Salesforce or HubSpot, is the source of truth. Without connecting GA data to CRM data, you're flying blind. You might celebrate a blog post for generating 50 leads a month in GA, while your CRM data shows that every single one of those leads was unqualified junk. Tying revenue back to the original source requires a system that bridges the gap between marketing analytics and sales data.

What GA Deliberately Excludes: PII and Competitor Insights

Some data isn't missing because of a technical limitation, it’s deliberately left out for very important privacy, legal, and practical reasons. Understanding these exclusions helps you know what GA was never intended to do.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

For crucial privacy reasons (like GDPR and CCPA compliance), Google Analytics' terms of service strictly forbid collecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This includes names, email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers. You cannot track specific, named individuals inside GA's reports.

This means if John Doe visits your website five times, browses three product pages, and then calls your sales team, you can’t look up “John Doe” in GA to see his journey. The data in Google Analytics is aggregated and anonymized. While you can use a "User-ID" to track anonymous logged-in users across devices, this ID itself cannot be PII.

Your CRM and email marketing platform (e.g., Klaviyo) are the correct places to store and analyze individual contact data. These systems are designed to handle PII securely and track customer-level engagement.

Comprehensive Competitor Data

It sounds obvious, but it's worth stating: Google Analytics only knows about your website. It has zero data on your competitors' performance. It cannot tell you:

• How much traffic your competitors are getting.
• Which keywords are driving their organic traffic.
• Which of their pages or products are most popular.
• What countries their audience is in.
• Where they're getting their referral traffic from.

You can be obsessively checking your own traffic while being completely unaware that a competitor just launched a new marketing channel that's eroding your market share. For an in-depth competitive analysis, you must rely on third-party SEO and marketing intelligence tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or SimilarWeb.

The Biggest Untracked Metric: Your Time Spent Reporting

The final, and perhaps most significant, thing missing from Google Analytics is a unified view. By itself, it only tells one part of the story. To get the full picture, you're forced to piece together information from half a dozen other sources.

A typical reporting workflow for a marketer looks painfully manual:

1. Log into Google Analytics, export a traffic report as a CSV.
2. Log into Facebook Ads, export a campaign performance report.
3. Log into HubSpot, download a list of new leads by source.
4. Open a massive Google Sheet or Excel file.
5. Spend the next two hours cleaning, formatting, and matching the data across spreadsheets to create a few simple charts.

By the time you've finished wrestling with the data, your report is already outdated, and you've wasted half your day on manual data wrangling instead of acting on insights. Google Analytics doesn't track this hidden cost - the hours you and your team spend jumping between platforms and building manual reports.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics is an essential tool for understanding website behavior, but it's just one piece of the puzzle. A clear view of your business requires blending its quantitative data with qualitative user insights from behavior analytics tools, performance metrics from ad platforms, revenue data from your CRM, and market intelligence from competitive analysis tools.

Manually stitching this all together is a huge drain on time and energy, which is exactly why we built Graphed. We automate the entire process by connecting directly to platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, and Salesforce. Instead of building endless spreadsheets, you can just ask questions in plain English - like "Compare Facebook ad spend to Shopify revenue last month" - and instantly get a real-time dashboard with the answers.