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Tom Rivera implements analytics for agencies. He's redone botched setups often enough to know where people go wrong before they even look at reports.

UTM parameters need consistent naming from day one. He inherited a client using "google," "Google," "GOOGLE," and "search" for the same source. Six months of data became useless for tracking paid versus organic. Document your naming convention in a shared sheet before running any campaigns. Stick to lowercase, use underscores not spaces, decide on abbreviations once.

Filter out internal traffic properly or your conversion rates lie. Most people block their office IP and call it done. Tom sets up separate views: one raw, one filtered for IP ranges, one excluding known bots. He caught a client whose "traffic spike" was their dev team's staging site tests hitting production analytics. Check your top converting sessions—if you see your own city with unusual patterns, your filters miss something.

Event tracking breaks when developers don't know the measurement plan. Tom creates a tracking spec document listing every button click, form submission, and scroll depth event before touching code. Developers implement what's documented. Without it, you get inconsistent naming, missing events, or duplicate fires.

He spends three hours on proper setup versus fixing corrupted historical data later. You can't retroactively fix tracking that was wrong for months.

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