My traffic collapse turned out to be a missing analytics tag. What do you check first?

[Allyson Barnes]

A while back I opened analytics on one of my sites and traffic had fallen off a cliff. Overnight. I did what I suspect most of us do... assumed Google had finally come for me.

I spent longer than I'd like to admit on ranking theories. Re-read the update chatter, started listing pages to audit, the whole spiral. Eventually I opened Search Console to pull evidence for my diagnosis, and the line was flat. Completely normal. Clicks hadn't moved at all.

The analytics tag had dropped out of the header during a template change. Visitors were all still there, I just wasn't counting them. The fix took minutes. The panic took considerably longer.

It changed how I handle every drop since. I don't diagnose anything until I've checked whether the traffic actually left, and when Search Console and analytics disagree, the problem is nearly always the measurement, not the rankings.

So, curious. When a drop shows up, what do you rule out first? And be honest, what's the silliest false alarm you've chased?