Are you flying blind? If your conversion data is wrong, your budget allocation is wrong.

In the world of digital marketing, data is your compass. It tells you what’s working, what’s wasted spend, and where to double down. But for many small-to-mid-sized businesses and agencies, that compass is spinning wildly. We often see marketing leaders making six-figure decisions based on data that is 20%, 30%, or even 50% inaccurate.

When conversion tracking breaks, it rarely announces itself with a loud error message. Instead, it fails silently. You might see a slow decline in ROAS, a discrepancy between your CRM and Google Analytics, or—worst of all—you might see “good” numbers that are actually phantom duplicates.

If you suspect your analytics setup is leaking value, you aren’t alone. With the shift to GA4, the rise of consent banners, and the complexity of server-side tagging, “setting and forgetting” your pixels is no longer a strategy. It’s a liability.

Here are the five most common signs your conversion tracking is broken, and the practical steps you need to take to fix them immediately.

1. Your Google Ads “Recording Rate” Is Under 80%

One of the quickest health checks you can perform lives directly inside your Google Ads account, yet few marketers monitor it. It’s called the recording rate (sometimes inferred by comparing clicks to sessions, or modeled conversions to observed ones).

In a perfect world, every ad click that results in a conversion would be recorded. But we don’t live in a perfect world; we live in a privacy-first one. Between iOS updates, ad blockers, and cookie rejection, losing some data is normal. However, if your ability to match conversions back to ad clicks drops significantly—effectively recording less than 80% of reality—something is technically wrong.

Why this happens: This often signals a disconnect between your website’s tag firing triggers and the Google Ads click ID (GCLID). If your page loads too slowly, or if a consent banner blocks the Google Ads tag before a user accepts, the GCLID is lost. The conversion happens, but Google Ads can’t claim the credit.

How to fix it:

• Check your “Tag Coverage”: Use Google Tag Manager’s “Preview” mode to ensure your Conversion Linker tag fires on every page view, not just the landing page.
• Audit Consent Mode: Ensure your tags aren’t being blocked entirely. They should be “listening” for consent updates.
• Implement Enhanced Conversions: This feature allows you to send hashed first-party data (like email addresses) back to Google, helping recover conversions where the cookie was lost.

2. GA4 and Google Ads Show Wildly Different Numbers

“Why does Google Ads say we had 50 conversions, but GA4 only reports 30?”

This is the most common question we get at Rawsoft. A small discrepancy is natural due to different attribution models (Google Ads is selfish; it loves to take credit for everything it touched. GA4 is more holistic). A variance of 10-15% is acceptable.

The Warning Sign: If you see a discrepancy of 30% or more, your tracking is broken. This usually means one platform is counting the same event multiple times, or one platform is failing to capture the event entirely.

How to fix it:

• Unify Your Counting Method: Check if Google Ads is counting “Every” conversion vs. “One” conversion per click. For lead gen, it should usually be “One.”
• De-duplicate with Transaction IDs: If you are in e-commerce (perhaps using Olo.com or Shopify), ensure you are passing a unique Transaction ID with every purchase event. This prevents the “thank you page reload” problem where a user refreshing their confirmation page counts as a new sale.
• Verify Cross-Domain Tracking: If your users move from your main site to a third-party booking engine or checkout domain, ensure your GA4 session isn’t breaking. If it breaks, the source becomes “Direct/None,” and the ad attribution is lost.

3. Your Consent Banner Isn’t in “Advanced” Consent Mode

Privacy compliance is non-negotiable, but it shouldn’t destroy your data visibility. Many businesses slap a generic cookie banner on their site that acts like a brick wall: if a user doesn’t click “Accept,” zero data is sent to Google.

While compliant, this is data suicide. You are losing visibility into 30-60% of your traffic depending on your region.

The Solution: Advanced Consent Mode v2 Google’s “Advanced” Consent Mode allows tags to fire in a limited, cookie-less capacity even before consent is granted. It sends “pings” that tell Google, “A conversion happened, but I can’t read the cookie.” Google then uses AI modeling to fill in the gaps in your reports, giving you aggregate data without violating user privacy.

Key Takeaway: If your consent banner blocks tags completely (Basic Mode), you aren’t just respecting privacy—you are blinding your algorithms. Switch to Advanced Mode to recover modeled conversions and feed your bidding algorithms better data.

4. Meta Shows 0% “Event Match Quality”

Open your Meta (Facebook) Events Manager. Look at your Purchase or Lead event. Do you see an “Event Match Quality” score?

If it’s low (under 4/10) or zero, you are wasting money on Facebook Ads.

With the death of third-party cookies, Meta relies heavily on server-side matching. It needs you to send it customer data—hashed emails, phone numbers, first names, ZIP codes—alongside the conversion event so it can match that user to a Facebook profile.

Why it matters: If Meta can’t match the user, it can’t optimize for them. Your “Lookalike Audiences” become dumber, and your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) rises.

How to fix it:

• Enable CAPI (Conversions API): Client-side pixels are no longer enough. You need a server-side connection (sGTM or direct integration) to send hashed user data securely.
• Data Layer Audit: Ensure your website’s data layer is actually exposing the user’s email or phone number on the confirmation page so your tags can grab it, hash it, and send it.

5. ROAS Suddenly Dropped But Nothing Changed

This is the silent killer. You didn’t change your bids. You didn’t change your creatives. Seasonality is flat. Yet, your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) has plummeted from 4.0 to 2.0 over three weeks.

When performance drops without a strategic reason, it is almost always a technical tracking failure.

Common technical culprits:

• Website Code Updates: Did your dev team push a site update recently? They might have accidentally removed the data layer or changed the CSS selector your triggers rely on.
• Trigger Failure: If your trigger fires on a “Thank You” URL, but the URL structure changed from /thank-you to /order-confirmed, your tracking just flatlined.
• Payment Gateway Redirects: Did you add PayPal or a new payment option? Sometimes these gateways strip tracking parameters when redirecting the user back to your site.

How to fix it: Stop optimizing bids and start auditing code. Check your “Change History” in Google Tag Manager. Use the “TagPipes Auditor” or similar monitoring tools to simulate a conversion and verify if the tag actually fires.

Summary: Stop Guessing, Start Auditing

Broken conversion tracking isn’t just a headache; it’s a budget leak. Every day your data is inaccurate is a day your automated bidding algorithms are learning from bad signals.

To recap, here is your fix-it list:

1. Verify GCLID: Ensure your ads can talk to your site.
2. Compare Platforms: Investigate GA4 vs. Ads discrepancies over 15%.
3. Upgrade Consent: Move to Advanced Consent Mode v2.
4. Feed Meta: Improve Event Match Quality with server-side data.
5. Monitor Changes: Treat code updates as potential tracking risks.

Your analytics should be an asset, not a liability. If you aren’t 100% confident in the numbers on your dashboard, it’s time to look under the hood.

Ready to Trust Your Data Again?

Don’t let technical glitches drain your marketing budget. At Rawsoft, we specialize in fixing the “unfixable” tracking errors that plague growing agencies and brands.

[Click here to book your Free 15-Minute Audit Call] We’ll do a live spot-check of your setup and identify your biggest data leaks—no strings attached.