Your conversion tracking is probably lying to you
Subramanyam 4 min read
Before you optimise anything, the number you are optimising towards has to be right. In practice it usually is not.
The three failures we find most
Duplicate firing is the most common: a thank-you page that reloads, or a tag installed both in Tag Manager and hard-coded in the template. Both fire, both count, and reported conversions run roughly double reality.
The second is attribution drift, where a channel gets credit because it was the last touch on a journey it had nothing to do with starting.
The third is silent breakage. A developer renames a CSS class, a click trigger stops matching, and a conversion quietly reports zero for five weeks before anyone notices.
How to check
Fire a real conversion yourself and watch it arrive. Compare the analytics count against your actual sales records for the same period. If those two numbers disagree by more than a few percent, stop optimising until you know why.
- Conversion Rate
- GA4
- Reporting