Five signs your ad tracking is broken

Ad tracking doesn’t usually break with a bang. There’s no error message and no alert. The ads keep running, the reports keep filling up with numbers, and everything looks normal. It’s only weeks or months later that someone notices the numbers stopped making sense.

Here are five signs we see again and again, and what each one usually means.

1. Your ads report more sales than your shop

Add up the sales Google Ads and Facebook each say they brought in last month. Now compare that with the number of orders in your online shop, or new customers in your customer database.

If the ad platforms claim more sales than you actually made in total, something is being counted more than once. Some of that is normal, because each platform takes credit for customers who saw ads on both. But if the gap is large, or it suddenly gets bigger, it often means a sale is being recorded twice on your website.

What to check: place a test order and see whether it appears once or twice in each platform. We cover the reasons for this gap in more detail in why your ad platforms report more sales than you made.

2. Results changed overnight, but nothing else did

A campaign that was doing well suddenly reports no sales. Or a quiet campaign starts reporting far more than usual. You didn’t change the ads, the budget or the offer.

When results change sharply on one particular day, look at what else changed that day. A website update, a new checkout, a new theme for your online shop, a new cookie banner or a change of payment provider are the usual suspects. Any of these can stop the tracking code from running on the page that matters.

What to check: look at your website’s recent changes alongside the date the numbers moved. If they line up, test the tracking again.

3. Google Analytics and your ad platforms disagree wildly

Google Analytics and the ad platforms will never match exactly. They count differently, and that’s fine. But they should move together. If Google Analytics shows sales from Facebook rising while Facebook shows them falling, or one shows sales and the other shows almost none, something is wrong.

A common cause is that links from your ads have lost the tags that tell Google Analytics where a visitor came from. Another is that Google Analytics itself isn’t recording sales properly, so it can’t give credit to anyone.

What to check: pick one week and one channel, and compare the trend in Google Analytics with the trend in the ad platform. If the shapes don’t match, dig in.

4. Sales values look odd

Sometimes the number of sales looks right but the value doesn’t. Every sale is recorded at the same amount. Values include tax in one place but not another. A sale of a few hundred dollars shows up as a few dollars, or a few hundred thousand.

This usually means the tracking is sending the wrong figure, or no figure at all, so the platform falls back on a default. It matters because many businesses let the platforms set bids based on the value of each sale. Wrong values mean the platform is aiming at the wrong customers.

What to check: look at a handful of recent sales in each platform and compare the values with the real orders.

5. Nobody knows who set it up

This one isn’t a number, but it’s often the most telling sign. Ask who set up your tracking, and when it was last checked. If the answer is “a developer we don’t use any more”, “our old agency” or “not sure”, there’s a good chance something has drifted.

Tracking is usually set up once and then forgotten, while the website around it keeps changing. Without someone responsible for checking it, small problems pile up.

What to check: find out who has access to your ad accounts, Google Analytics and website, and make one person responsible for testing the tracking after every website change.

A simple test you can run today

You don’t need any technical knowledge for this:

1. Pick a quiet time and place a real test order on your website, or fill in your enquiry form.
2. Note the time and the amount.
3. The next day, look for that sale in Google Analytics and in each ad platform’s reports.
4. Check it appears once, at the right amount, in each place.

If it doesn’t appear, or appears twice, or shows the wrong amount, your tracking needs attention. Cancel or refund the test order afterwards so it doesn’t affect your accounts.

Getting it fixed

Broken tracking is usually cheap to fix once you know where the problem is. The hard part is finding it, and knowing how much it has been costing you in the meantime.

Our Ads & Analytics Audit tests your tracking, lines up what your ad platforms report against your real sales, and gives you a list of fixes in order of cost. Read what a Google and Facebook ads audit actually checks for the full list. Or start with the free Data Maturity Assessment for a quick score on how well you track and report on sales.