Managing Google Analytics across clients is a full-time job. Every client has a different GA4 property, often set up by a previous developer with inconsistent event schemas. Some use Google Tag Manager, some have hardcoded tracking. Some have Universal Analytics data that never got migrated. You spend hours navigating between accounts, rebuilding the same reports for different clients, and troubleshooting tracking issues that stem from years of accumulated configuration debt.
Client reporting eats your margins. Every month, you pull data from analytics dashboards, format it into slides or PDFs, add commentary, and send it to clients. For agencies with 10+ clients, this reporting cycle can consume days of billable time. The reports themselves often focus on vanity metrics — pageviews, sessions, bounce rate — because the tools make it hard to show the metrics that clients actually care about: leads, sales, and revenue.
Cookie compliance multiplied. Every client site using Google Analytics needs a consent banner if it serves EU visitors. That means implementing and maintaining consent management platforms across every client project, updating cookie policies when regulations change, and fielding client questions about GDPR compliance. For an agency managing 20 sites, this compliance overhead is substantial.