Conversion tracking
If your tracking is broken, nobody tells you.
Your website keeps working. Your ads keep running. Your invoices keep arriving. The only thing that stops is the part that tells you whether any of it is working — and that part fails silently.
THE PROBLEM
You're spending the money either way.
Most of what I get called in for isn't a business that never set tracking up. It's a business that did set it up, watched it work for a while, and then had something quietly change underneath it.
A consent banner gets updated. A booking system moves to a new domain. A plugin gets cancelled to save a subscription. None of those look like tracking decisions, so nobody connects them to the numbers going strange.
And because nothing visibly breaks, it can run like that for months.
01
It was never set up
Ads running with no conversion actions configured at all. More common than you'd think, especially where an outside agency set up the account and moved on.
02
It broke and stayed broken
Something changed on the site or in consent, and the data stopped reaching the ad platform. Analytics may still look fine, which is exactly why nobody notices.
03
It works but measures the wrong thing
Numbers arrive, so everyone assumes they're right. But sales get counted twice, or attribution is lost at a redirect, and the platform optimises against a picture that isn't true.
OWNERSHIP
Whatever I build is in your name.
Your Google Ads account, your analytics, your pixel, your containers — set up in your accounts, under your business. If you ever stop working with me, you take every bit of it with you and lose nothing.
That should be normal. It isn't. Plenty of agencies build these in their own accounts, so the day you leave, your history, your data and your audiences stay with them and you start again from zero.
It takes about five minutes to find out which situation you're in.
- Sign in to Google Ads yourself — not through anyone else's login.
- Check whether your business is the account owner, or whether you only have access to someone else's.
- Do the same for Google Analytics and your Meta pixel.
- If you can't sign in at all, you have your answer.
WHAT I SET UP
The whole measurement chain, not one piece of it.
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Google Analytics 4
Configured around what your business actually needs to know — not the default install that reports pageviews and little else.
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Google Tag Manager
Web containers, and server-side containers where they're needed. Structured so it can be changed later without breaking.
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Server-side tracking
For when browser-side collection isn't reliable enough — ad blockers, browser restrictions, or data you don't want passing through the client.
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Google Ads conversions
Real conversion actions, sending real data back, so the campaigns have something true to optimise against.
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Meta pixel and Conversions API
Both sides, with deduplication set up properly, so one sale is counted once rather than twice.
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Consent Mode v2
Consent that actually works and is actually recorded. Not a banner that looks compliant while the signals underneath say something else.
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Cross-domain and iframe tracking
The hard case: booking systems and payment providers that hand the customer to another domain mid-purchase, and lose the session on the way.
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Booking and ecommerce events
Purchases, bookings and their values passed through correctly, so revenue reporting means something.
HOW I WORK
Find out what's actually happening first.
Tracking problems are diagnosed, not guessed at. The order matters, because each step rules something out.
Establish what's true right now
What the platforms are reporting, what the site is actually sending, and where those two disagree. Assumptions get checked rather than inherited.
Find where the chain breaks
Tags firing or not. Data passing between containers or not. Present in analytics but missing in the ad platform. Each answer narrows it down.
Build it properly, in your accounts
Not a patch over the symptom. If the structure is the problem, the structure gets rebuilt — and it gets built in your name.
Verify end to end
A real transaction, followed all the way through to the ad platform. If it can't be traced from click to conversion, it isn't finished.
Tell you what's still not perfect
Some gaps cost more to close than they're worth. You get the real number and the choice, not a claim that everything is at 100%.
PROOF
What this looks like in practice.
CASE STUDY
Six months of ad spend with no bookings measured
A multi-location escape room business had campaigns reporting zero booking conversions for six months, while roughly €450 a month kept going out. The cause was a €9 consent plugin somebody had cancelled — and a booking iframe that had been quietly losing attribution for far longer.
fit
Worth being straight about who this suits.
This is for you if
- You're spending real money on ads and can't confidently say what it produces
- Your numbers stopped making sense and nobody can tell you why
- Bookings or sales happen through an embedded system, another domain, or a payment provider
- An agency set everything up and you're not sure what you actually own
- Nobody in your company is watching whether the measurement still works
Probably not, if
- You have someone in-house who already owns this and does it well
- You're not advertising and don't intend to — there's less to measure
- You want someone to run the ad campaigns themselves rather than fix what sits underneath them
- You want it cheap and fast rather than correct
start here
Not sure whether yours is working?
Tell me what you're running and what you're seeing. If your tracking is fine, I'll tell you that too — it's a short conversation either way.