Fix your tracking before you spend another dollar on ads

Every ad platform optimises toward the conversions you report to it. If those conversions are wrong, missing or counted twice, the platform gets better and better at buying the wrong thing. That's why tracking comes before any new campaign.

The symptoms

You probably have a tracking problem if:

• Meta or Google Ads reports more purchases than your store or Stripe shows.
• Google Analytics lists a lot of revenue under "(direct) / (none)".
• Your retargeting audiences stay tiny even though the site has traffic.
• Two people on your team quote different "conversion rates" for the same week.

The checklist

1. One source of truth for money

Pick the system that actually holds the money, usually your store or Stripe, and treat everything else as an estimate. When the ad platforms and that system disagree, the system wins.

Check that it is set to the same timezone and currency as your analytics. A store on one timezone and GA4 on another will never reconcile day by day.

2. One primary conversion per campaign

Each campaign should optimise for one event: a purchase, or a trial start. If an account has several "primary" purchase actions, the platform counts the same sale more than once. Keep one primary and mark the rest secondary.

3. Server-side where you can

Browser pixels miss people who block scripts or leave before the page finishes loading. Sending purchases server-side (Meta's Conversions API, Google's enhanced conversions) closes most of that gap. Verify it with a real test purchase before you spend.

4. UTMs on every link you publish

Every ad, post and email link should carry utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. Without them, paid and email traffic lands in "direct" and nobody gets credit. On Google Ads, put them in the campaign's final URL suffix so every ad inherits them.

Don't put UTMs on links between your own pages. That restarts the session and hides where the visitor really came from.

5. Audiences that actually fill

Once the pixel sees product views, add-to-carts and checkouts, build retargeting audiences from them. If an audience stays near zero after a week of traffic, the event behind it isn't firing.

Then, and only then, spend

When the numbers from your store, GA4 and the ad platforms land within a reasonable margin of each other, you can judge a campaign on its results. Until then, a "winning" campaign might just be the one that's best at being counted.

This is the first job our tracking agent does in a new workspace: compare the sources, list what disagrees, and hand you the fixes before anyone touches the budget.