When somebody checks whether tracking is installed, they check the homepage. The tag is there, the real-time report shows a visitor, done. Then the quarter ends and product-page traffic is missing from every report, because the tag was only ever on one template.
The public audit fetches one page past the homepage on every run, a product page, a collection or an article, and compares the measurement IDs it finds. As of October 2026, 52 percent of audited sites pass that check cleanly. The rest either warn, where some IDs are missing, or fail, where the second page has no tracking at all.
How a site ends up tracked on one template
- The snippet was pasted into the homepage template rather than the shared layout.
- A page builder has per-page custom code and the tag was added to one page.
- The product page template was rebuilt by a different developer without the header include.
- A single-page app loads tracking on the first route and never fires on client-side navigations.
- The blog runs on a different platform or subdomain with its own, older, setup.
None of these produce an error. The site works and the homepage reports look normal.
Why it matters more than it sounds
The homepage is rarely where money is made. Product pages, landing pages and articles are where visitors arrive from ads and search, and where they convert. Tracking that covers the homepage and not those pages measures the least valuable traffic on the site and misses the rest. Attribution is wrong, remarketing audiences are tiny, and conversion rates per landing page are unknowable.
How to check it yourself
Pick three pages: a product or service page, a category or collection page, and a blog post if you have one. On each, open the network panel and reload. You are looking for the same set of requests you see on the homepage: the GA4 collect call, the GTM container, each ad pixel. Any page where one is missing is a page that is not tracked.
If you have many templates, a tag inventory scan that crawls a sample of pages per template does this for you on a schedule.
Fixing it
Put the container snippet in the one layout file every page inherits, and nowhere else. On a site where that is not possible, use the platform's site-wide code injection rather than per-page fields. On a single-page app, fire a virtual page view on every route change and trigger tags from that event rather than from the initial page load.
Then re-run the deep-page check. The audit's second page is chosen from your own internal links, so it reflects the templates you actually use.
FAQ
Why does GA4 show traffic only to my homepage?
Because the GA4 tag is probably only installed on the homepage template. Check a product or article page in the browser's network panel for the GA4 collect request. If it is absent, move the snippet to the shared layout.
Does the free audit check more than the homepage?
Yes. It fetches one additional page chosen from the site's own links and compares the tracking IDs found on each. Missing IDs on the second page produce a warning or a failure.
What about pages behind login or checkout?
A page-level audit cannot reach them. For those, use a synthetic journey that logs in or checks out on a schedule and asserts that the right events fire.
Check any URL at tageasy.io/check to see whether your tracking survives past the homepage.