REAL PROBLEM · SOLVED
Six months of ad spend with nothing measured
A multi-location escape room business was running Google Ads campaigns that stopped reporting bookings for six months. The cause was a €9-a-month plugin somebody had turned off.
The situation
An escape room business with locations in several cities. Bookings happen online, through a booking system embedded in their website. They spend around €450 a month on Google Ads, and the campaigns had been performing well for years.
Like most businesses this size, everyone on staff is running the actual service — front desk, game masters, customer service. There is no one in-house whose job is to watch whether the online side is still working.
The symptom
Campaigns that had been producing bookings stopped recording a single one. The only conversions still showing were gift voucher purchases — and those turned out to be the clue, because they were tracked by a completely different mechanism.
The ads kept running. The budget kept spending. Traffic kept arriving. And the account reported that none of it was producing anything.
Three campaigns recorded nothing at all. The only conversions showing are gift voucher purchases, which fire their own tag directly on the page and bypassed the broken path entirely.
WHAT IT COST
The saving was real.
So was the bill.
Google Ads uses conversion data to decide who to show your ads to. With almost no conversions coming back, the campaigns had nothing to optimise toward — so the spend wasn't just unmeasured, it was allocated blind for half a year.
How I found it
When conversions disappear, the fault is almost always in one of a few places, so I work through them in order rather than guessing:
- Are the tags firing at all, and on the right pages?
- Is data passing correctly between containers?
- Does GA4 show the conversions, or is it blind too?
- If GA4 has them but Google Ads doesn't, the break is between the two — not in collection.
GA4 had the purchase data for the whole period. Everything routed through to Google Ads had stopped.
The events were being collected. They just weren't reaching the ad platform.
What was actually wrong
1. Consent had been switched off
The business had been using a cookie consent platform on its free tier. The service moved to paid — about €9 a month — and the company decided not to pay for it.
Turning it off didn't remove consent handling. It left the site sending signals that advertising consent had not been granted.
That distinction is why nobody caught it: analytics collection carried on, so GA4 still filled up with data and everything looked normal from the inside. But without advertising consent, nothing routed through the tag manager reached Google Ads. The only conversions still arriving were gift vouchers, which fired from a AdWords code that was hardcoded on the page — a different path, and the reason the account wasn't showing an absolute zero.
Nobody made a mistake in the tracking. Someone made a reasonable-looking decision to cancel a small subscription, and the consequence surfaced two systems away, in a place none of them had a reason to check.
2. Attribution was broken as well
While diagnosing the first problem I found a second one that had been there longer.
Bookings happen inside an iframe embedded in the site. At the end of the booking, the customer is redirected to another domain to complete it. That redirect broke session continuity — the session lost the record of where the visitor originally came from.
The result: gift voucher purchases had proper channel attribution, and bookings — the main revenue line — had almost none. The business could see that sales were happening. It could not see which channel produced them.
What I did
Restored consent properly. A free consent management plugin went back in, configured correctly, so advertising consent is granted and recorded as it should be. The requirement here isn't optional — consent has to work, and it has to actually be consent, not a workaround.
Rebuilt the tracking architecture. The old setup relied on a single container firing a purchase event on a thank-you page, which the iframe and the cross-domain redirect had made unreliable. I replaced it with two containers that talk to each other:
That way the conversion is registered in the parent context, where the session and its origin still exist, instead of being lost at the redirect.
Total: roughly 20–25 hours, including building and testing the new two-container system.
THE RESULT
Measured again - and
optimising against real data.
✓
Conversions recorded in GA4 again
80%
of conversions now carry correct channel attribution - up from almost none on bookings
✓
Conversions syncing through to Google Ads
✓
Campaigns optimising against real data again
WHAT'S STILL NOT PERFECT
About 20% of bookings still lose their attribution
The ones paid through Stripe or PayPal lose their session ID during the payment redirect, so those conversions get recorded but without channel attribution.
Solving it properly would take more work. I laid out what it would involve and what it would cost, and the client decided the remaining gap wasn't worth the spend. That's a reasonable call, and it's their call to make. I'd rather tell you the number is 80% than round it up to 100%.
Why this happens
Nothing here was exotic. A subscription got cancelled. A booking flow crossed a domain boundary. Both are ordinary. What made it expensive was that six months passed before anyone knew.
Tracking doesn't fail loudly. It fails silently, and it stays failed until somebody who knows where to look actually looks.
Nothing breaks on the website. No customer complains. The ads keep running and the invoices keep arriving.
If you're spending money on ads and nobody in your company checks whether the measurement behind it still works, this is a question worth asking now rather than in six months.
That's the work I do — here's how I set tracking up and what I check.