What a tracking audit usually finds, and how to fix it fast
Broken conversions, duplicate pixels and a data layer nobody owns. The same problems show up almost everywhere.
When a new client tells me "we don't trust our numbers," I start with the tracking. Not the dashboards, not the warehouse: the tags on the site and app that create the data in the first place. Over thirteen years of these audits, the findings are remarkably consistent.
What I usually find
- Conversions counted twice, because a thank-you page reloads or two tags send the same purchase.
- Key steps not tracked at all, so a funnel jumps from "started" to "finished" with nothing in between.
- Pixels from agencies that left years ago, still loading on every page.
- Tags that ignore the visitor's consent choice.
- A data layer that grew by accident, with three names for the same thing.
- Campaign tags (UTMs) used inconsistently, so "email" shows up under five different spellings.
Why it matters more than it looks
Ad platforms optimize toward the conversions you send them. If purchases are double counted or missing, you are teaching the bidding algorithm the wrong lesson with real money. And every report built on top inherits the error.
One container decides which tags fire and honors consent
How I fix it
- Inventory every tag and what it sends, then remove what nobody uses.
- Write a short tracking plan: the events that matter, their names and their parameters.
- Rebuild the data layer and tags to match the plan, in the tag manager, not hard-coded.
- Test every key event in every consent state, on web and app, before publishing.
- Add monitoring so a broken tag is caught in a day, not a quarter.
On a large insurance engagement, rebuilding tracking this way was what let the team see exactly where people dropped out of the quote flow. Fixing those steps lifted completion 15%. The tracking itself did not sell anything; it showed the team where to look.
A focused audit of a typical site takes days, not months. If your numbers feel off, it is the cheapest place to start.
Working on something like this? I help teams fix tracking, build CDPs and make marketing data ready for AI.
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