Analytics
Conversion Tracking Fundamentals
If your events are wrong, every decision downstream is wrong with confidence. Here's the minimum viable setup, done properly.
Tracking is the least glamorous and highest-leverage work in performance marketing. An account with average creative and excellent measurement will beat an account with excellent creative and broken measurement, because only one of them can tell what's working.
Define one canonical event per action
Decide, in writing, what counts as a conversion: which action, at which moment, with what value. Then make sure exactly one event fires for it, from one source of truth, with a deduplication ID shared between browser and server. Most messy accounts have three definitions of 'lead' and no agreement on which is real.
Browser plus server
- Browser events capture context and are lost to blockers, consent refusals and Safari's restrictions.
- Server events are resilient and authoritative but lack some context.
- Send both, with a shared event ID so platforms deduplicate rather than double-count.
- Pass hashed customer information where you have a lawful basis, to improve match quality.
The checks that catch real problems
- Compare platform-reported conversions against backend orders for 30 days. Explain any gap over about 15%.
- Fire a test transaction end to end monthly and watch it arrive in every destination.
- Check for duplicate tags after every site release — this is the most common regression.
- Verify consent mode behaviour by testing with consent denied.
- Confirm value and currency are passed correctly, including on discounted orders.
Don't over-engineer
Five well-defined events beat forty inconsistent ones. Track the primary conversion, one or two meaningful intent steps, and revenue. Everything else is usually reporting theatre that creates more disagreement than insight.
A good habit
Keep a tracking spec document: event names, triggers, parameters, owners. When someone asks why two numbers disagree, that document is the answer.
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