When Analytics Data Becomes Central Evidence
Digital analytics systems record how visitors arrive at a website, what they do while there, and whether they convert. In many disputes, those metrics are central evidence, yet the underlying tracking configuration is rarely examined closely until litigation forces the issue. Bill Hartzer provides analytics forensics services, reviewing tracking setups, logs, and reports to determine what the data actually shows.
Analytics platforms are configured by people, and every configuration choice — which events count as conversions, how sessions are defined, which traffic is filtered out as bot activity — shapes the numbers that come out the other end. Two analytics accounts tracking the same underlying website traffic can report meaningfully different results depending entirely on how each was set up.
When Analytics Forensics Is Needed
Analytics forensics work is typically triggered by one of a small number of recurring situations.
- Conflicting performance reports between an agency and its client
- Unexplained drops or spikes in reported traffic or conversions
- Suspected misconfiguration of tags or tracking codes
- Disputes about whether campaigns actually produced the conversions claimed
- Questions about data integrity, manipulation, or selective reporting
Forensic Review Areas
- Tag and pixel configuration, including Google Analytics, GA4, and Google Tag Manager setups
- Channel and source attribution rules and how they assign credit for conversions
- Event tracking, goal configuration, and funnel setup
- IP filters, spam filtering, and bot-exclusion settings that affect reported traffic
- Exported logs and raw data, where available, compared against summarized dashboard reports
Wherever possible, Bill works from exported raw data rather than summarized dashboard views, since dashboards apply their own filtering and rounding logic that can obscure the underlying discrepancy a dispute actually turns on.
Analytics forensics work frequently overlaps with other digital marketing disputes, since questions about whether a PPC campaign or an SEO engagement actually performed as reported almost always come back to whether the analytics tracking that measured it was configured and interpreted correctly in the first place.