DebugView shows every event firing perfectly. Tag Assistant confirms your tags are working. You wait 48 hours and check GA4 reports—empty. The configuration isn’t broken. You’ve just discovered the test-production gap that frustrates every store owner who sets up tracking themselves.

Your test environment is a lie. When you test, you disable ad blockers, grant consent immediately, and complete the checkout flow on your own device. Real visitors do none of these things. Ad blockers and consent rejection cause 15-40% fewer conversions than actual order counts—systematically, not randomly.

Why Test Events Work But Reports Don’t

Five factors create the gap between successful testing and empty production reports. Understanding these explains why your tracking isn’t broken—even when the data suggests it is.

1. You’re Checking Too Early

DebugView shows events instantly but standard GA4 reports take 24-48 hours. This trips up store owners constantly. You test on Tuesday, check reports Wednesday morning, see nothing, and start debugging a configuration that was working fine.

GA4’s real-time reports show recent events, but standard reports—the ones you actually use for analysis—process data through a pipeline that takes one to two days. Checking same-day data almost always shows empty reports.

The fix is patience. Wait 48 hours after testing before drawing conclusions.

2. Your Test Conditions Don’t Match Reality

Think about how you test tracking:

• Ad blockers disabled (or testing in a clean browser)
• Consent granted immediately when the banner appears
• Full page loads without closing tabs
• Checkout completed on your own device without payment gateway redirects interfering

Now think about real visitors. 31.5% run ad blockers globally. Many reject consent or ignore the banner entirely. They browse on phones with spotty connections, close tabs impatiently, and use payment methods like PayPal that redirect them away from your thank-you page.

Your test creates a best-case scenario that doesn’t exist in production. The tracking works perfectly in that scenario. But that scenario applies to maybe 60-70% of your actual traffic.

You may be interested in: I Don’t Understand GTM Server-Side Tagging: The WordPress Store Owner Plain-English Guide

3. Consent Mode Blocks More Than You Think

Cookie banners might block the GA4 event until user consents—if consent never happens, the purchase event is never fired.

With Consent Mode V2 in Basic mode, no tracking happens until explicit consent. If a visitor makes a purchase without interacting with your consent banner, the conversion never reaches GA4. You tested with consent granted. Your customers didn’t.

Advanced Consent Mode sends cookieless pings that enable behavioral modeling, but that modeling only activates when traffic thresholds are met. Most smaller stores never reach those thresholds, leaving them with gaps that modeling can’t fill.

4. Data Thresholding Hides Your Reports

Even when events reach GA4, you might not see them. Data thresholding actively hides data when metrics could reveal individual identities.

If you have Google Signals enabled, GA4 applies aggressive thresholding to protect user privacy. Demographics reports, interests reports, and some acquisition reports simply show “data not available” rather than low numbers that could identify individuals.

For new stores with limited traffic, thresholding can hide entire reports. The events exist in your data—they’re just being suppressed in the UI.

5. Payment Gateway Redirects Break the Chain

Client-side tracking fires JavaScript on your thank-you page. But what if the customer never reaches that page?

PayPal, Klarna, Afterpay, and other payment methods redirect customers away from your checkout. When they return—if they return—the session context may be lost. The conversion event fires in a different browser state than the one that started the journey.

This affects production more than testing because you probably test with direct card payment, completing checkout in one continuous session.

The Real Picture: What Production Data Looks Like

Here’s what’s actually happening when your reports look empty or low:

• 31.5% of visitors have ad blockers that prevent GA4’s tracking script from loading at all
• 40-70% of EU visitors reject or ignore cookie consent, blocking events in Basic Consent Mode
• Unknown percentage get redirected through payment gateways and lose session context
• 24-48 hours of data simply hasn’t been processed yet

A 15-40% gap between your WooCommerce order count and GA4-reported conversions isn’t tracking failure—it’s the expected result of browser-based tracking in a privacy-conscious world.

You may be interested in: GA4 BigQuery Event Limit: What Happens When Your WooCommerce Store Hits 1 Million

How to Actually Verify Production Tracking

Stop testing in ideal conditions. Start checking what real visitors experience.

Test With Ad Blockers Enabled

Install uBlock Origin. Enable strict mode. Then try your checkout flow. If your conversion event doesn’t fire, you’re seeing what a third of your visitors experience.

Reject Consent and Try Again

When your cookie banner appears, click reject or close it. Complete a test purchase. Check whether the event reaches GA4. If it doesn’t, neither do conversions from visitors who do the same.

Wait the Full 48 Hours

Before concluding tracking is broken, wait two full days for standard reports to populate. Check real-time reports for immediate signals, but don’t trust them for accurate counts.

Compare Against WooCommerce

Your WooCommerce order database is your source of truth. Compare GA4-reported purchases against actual orders. A 15-40% gap is normal for client-side tracking. Larger gaps suggest configuration issues worth investigating.

Eliminating the Test-Production Gap

The test-production gap exists because client-side tracking depends on browser conditions that differ between testers and real visitors.

Server-side tracking removes this variable entirely. Events fire from your server at the WooCommerce order hook—the moment payment completes. Ad blockers can’t block it. Consent decisions don’t affect it. Payment gateway redirects don’t interrupt it.

Transmute Engine™ captures conversions at this server-side hook, sending identical event data to GA4, Facebook, Google Ads, and BigQuery simultaneously. The same data appears whether you’re testing or a customer is purchasing. No gap between DebugView and production reports because events don’t depend on what’s happening in the browser.

Key Takeaways

• Wait 48 hours before concluding reports are broken—GA4 processing takes 24-48 hours.
• Test with ad blockers enabled and consent rejected to see what real visitors experience.
• 15-40% fewer conversions than WooCommerce orders is normal for client-side tracking.
• Data thresholding hides low-volume data—events may exist but be suppressed in reports.
• Server-side tracking eliminates the gap by capturing events at the order hook, not the browser.

Stop testing in ideal conditions. Start measuring what real visitors actually experience—or capture conversions server-side where browser conditions don’t matter. Learn how server-side tracking captures every conversion.