Joshua Lauer: Are You Tracking What Actually Drives Growth?

Joshua Lauer is a marketing-intelligence consultant who helps teams clean, connect, and operationalize their data — and we spoke about GA4 done right, UTM discipline, data warehousing, brand metrics that actually mean something, and how bad assumptions (like mis-calculated LTV) ripple into pricing, deliverability, and trust. Joshua’s central warning is urgency: “It’s really important to get your analytics sorted out as soon as possible so you know exactly where you’re heading,” because if your tracking (or your assumptions) are off, you might scale the wrong thing faster.

We unpack GA4’s event model — “with GA4… everything is an event” — and why you should enrich events with context (e.g., product review count and rating at view-time) to explain behavior, not just log it. Joshua shares a $50k cautionary tale — “These ads were set up with no UTM link tracking on them” — where the campaigns worked but attribution didn’t, turning real performance into “direct” traffic and hard lessons in governance.

From there, we zoom out to ownership and longevity: “If we don’t own our data, we don’t own our data.” Piping GA4 into BigQuery, joining ad spend and downstream outcomes, and keeping history protects you from platform amnesia — and reveals cross-channel cause and effect (like the “newsletter trap” where aggressive capture boosts list size but hurts inbox placement). We also cover measuring brand signals on purpose (applause/amplification/conversation rates) and why, creatively, “you don’t always have to be in sell mode.” Instead of brittle hyper-personalization, Joshua argues for clear personas to reach the majority without losing relevance.

Ultimately, the craft is pairing numerics with narrative: “The data… can tell you exactly what happened… but it doesn’t always tell you why.” Leaders bring the business context that turns dashboards into decisions.

Key takeaways

• Instrument the “why,” not just the “what.” Enrich GA4 events with meaningful parameters (e.g., review count/rating at product view).
• Make UTM discipline non-negotiable. Templates, pre-flight checks, and audits prevent “direct” from hiding paid impact.
• Own your history. Send GA4 to BigQuery and join with ad spend and customer data so platform changes don’t erase your past.
• Measure brand engagement, on purpose. Track applause/amplification/conversation rates and tailor posts to the behavior you want.
• Beware vanity growth. Aggressive email capture can tank deliverability; optimize the path, not just the signup count.
• Prefer personas over brittle hyper-personalization. Serve 3–5 clear archetypes to widen resonance.
• Context beats dashboards. Numbers show what happened; your business knowledge explains why — and what to do next.