Why analytics teams hate event spreadsheets

Spreadsheets made sense when sites shipped quarterly. Today, releases are weekly—or hourly. A static tab of events cannot keep pace with:

• Copy changes that move buttons and forms.
• New surfaces (A/B tests, landers, modals) launching without an analytics review.
• Consent requirements that vary by region and break manual tagging playbooks.

Three failure modes we see repeatedly:

1. Stale truth — the sheet says cta_click, the site emits ctaClick, GA4 shows both. Engineering and analytics disagree on the “real” schema.
2. Blind spots — net new components ship with zero coverage because nobody updated the sheet.
3. Drift — GTM containers accrete legacy tags, firing multiple times per event, inflating metrics.

TagZen’s approach:

• Crawl the live site to discover forms, CTAs, commerce intents, and consent surfaces.
• Generate an actual manifest from what exists today—not what we hope exists.
• Deploy with idempotent GTM writes and validated GA4 payloads.
• Continuously re-scan and alert when the live site drifts from the last approved manifest.

If your tracking plan lives in a spreadsheet, it’s already out of date. Tie it to the live DOM instead.